Ogden Codman House

The Ogden Codman House at seven East Ninety-Sixth Street stands as a deliberate piece of Paris transported to New York. Built between nineteen twelve and nineteen thirteen, the limestone townhouse was designed by the architect and interior decorator Ogden Codman Junior as his own residence. Codman famously co-authored the book The Decoration of Houses with Edith Wharton, a work that championed classical order and criticized the heavy, cluttered styles of the Victorian era. You can see this philosophy in the building’s proportions, which were intended to evoke the grace of an eighteenth-century French Renaissance townhouse rather than the overwhelming scale of other mansions from that period.