A Shaker Heights Library Repurposes Panelings From a New York City Penthouse

David Bauders and his wife Dolores had been adding antique finishes and fixtures to their 15,000-square-foot Shaker Heights home — a 1920s French Regency-style residence built by Halle Bros. department store co-founder Salmon Halle — ever since they bought it in 2011. So his interest was piqued when an architectural salvage store he’d patronized reached out to inform him of a recent acquisition: the hand-carved solid oak paneling, built-ins and parquet floor, along with the breccia marble fireplace, that graced one of the 54 rooms in Post cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post’s legendary New York City penthouse. 

In 1924, Post announced that she’d sold her Fifth Avenue mansion to a developer with the stipulation that the firm recreate her opulent residence on the top three floors of the 14-story apartment building to be constructed on the site. Workers removed rooms of architectural elements from the home before its demolition and installed them in Post’s new digs. In the years after Post’s lease expired, the penthouse was split into multiple units. Bauders believes the paneling was a casualty of a more recent COVID-era division. He snapped it up after seeing the store’s listing pictures.

“We had this space above our master (suite), this whole wing of our house that never had anything finished,” the founder and chief executive officer of data analytics company SPARXiQ says. “I thought, Oh, that’s a good use of that.”

The area above the primary suite was much bigger than the 550-square-foot room from which the paneling had been removed. Chardon-based general contractor Residence Artists framed a like-sized space for it, then reassembled the architectural elements. 

“They weren’t numbered or labeled or anything,” Bauders remembers. “It was like a giant puzzle that they had to figure out how to put together.”

Marissa Matiyasic, owner of Reflections Interior Design in Oakwood Village, recalls that the parquet floor arrived in 2-inch-by-12-inch pieces, some of which were damaged. Fabricators replicated the unusable blocks, along with a ruined wall panel, and fashioned wood sections to replace breccia marble missing from the bottom of the fireplace surround.

“We couldn’t source (the marble), and it was just as easy for our faux finishers to replicate it,” Matiyasic explains. “I mean, you cannot tell. It’s gorgeous.”

Bauders insisted on retaining the original layout of the penthouse room, a challenge considering it had two large windows and the new space had none. Matiyasic and her team resolved the issue by putting the entrance in the spot once occupied by a window and tucking a closet behind the original entrance’s double doors. The area where a window overlooking Central Park had been was left bare. Bauders plans to hire an artist to replicate the view. 

Matiyasic furnished the room in an eclectic style consistent with the rest of the home’s decor. The color palette was dictated by a 1960s Oushak rug and new pair of Taylor King slipper chairs in a chinoiserie-inspired orchard-themed pattern on orange velvet. She rounded out the seating group with a Highland House sofa ordered in a teal damask-patterned cut velvet, a 1970s Isabelle Faure coffee table with a sculptural brass base, vintage swivel club chairs reupholstered in gold velvet, and a new solid marble side table. The mix of old and new, together with vibrantly colored and patterned upholstery, injected vitality into a space that Matiyasic admits could’ve become stuffy.

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“(David) didn’t want it to feel new,” she adds. “He wanted it to feel collected.”

Bauders uses the room as a library where he displays acquisitions such as a painting by Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, two watercolors by the late British prime minister Winston Churchill, and the skeleton of an extinct marine reptile called a mosasaurus.

“With the skeleton and other artifacts that I’m going to be putting in there,” he says, “it’s like a little private museum.” 

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