The New York Times-20080124-Floating Floors on Bright Ribbons

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Floating Floors on Bright Ribbons

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LIGHT isn't just a tool to beat back the darkness. It's also a design tool.

David Ling, an architect who lives in Gramercy Park, wanted light coming from a variety of sources in his three-level apartment, so he put in a translucent glass front door and a skylight. But then he went way beyond the obvious and used light to create the illusion of floating objects.

In the basement library, he designed bookshelves to be three inches from the walls, and put a one-and-a-half-inch baffle below the rear of each shelf. The baffles conceal microfluorescent tubes, which silhouette the books and make the shelves look like they're floating, Mr. Ling said. The strong line of light links the books, and unifies the books even though the heights of the bindings are very different. The white glow makes an ordinary bookcase mysterious and inviting, a bookcase as hearth.

He wanted to highlight the contrast between the new floors and the original masonry walls in the basement and on the ground floor. So he created light channels that make the floors seem as if they, too, are floating, and graze the walls with light. The ground floor, shown, is six inches above the subfloor, and six inches from the walls. Into this six-by-six-inch space, he hard-wired Sylvania fixtures with 32-watt fluorescent tubes. (Fixture, $30; four-foot light tube, $7.79.) In the basement, which has a moat, the floor is 24 inches from the wall and is lighted by a 150-foot rope light from FlexTec ($63.33) attached to the floor's perimeter.

Small objects can and do fall into the six-inch space, he said, but you have to be able to get your hand in to change the fixtures.

[Illustration]PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY SUZANNE DeCHILLO/THE NEW YORK TIMES)