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On Location

Heaven Is Down the Hall

Slide 1 of 13

“Ruined grandeur” is how Anita Trehan describes the style of the restaurant specializing in chai that she plans to open on the bottom floors of her Harlem brownstone. The duplex upstairs, where she lives, is decorated in her interpretation of French Colonial style. 

 

Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
  • Slide 1 of 13

    “Ruined grandeur” is how Anita Trehan describes the style of the restaurant specializing in chai that she plans to open on the bottom floors of her Harlem brownstone. The duplex upstairs, where she lives, is decorated in her interpretation of French Colonial style. 

     

    Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

It all started with a cup of chai. Or the desire for one, at least.

Three years ago this month, Anita Trehan was walking along Water Street, in the financial district, when she had a craving for “a nice cup of chai,” she said.

But Ms. Trehan is from India, and she wanted an authentic chai — the kind brewed with aromatic, spiced black tea made smooth with milk — “not that watered-down chai latte,” she said dismissively. And it was nowhere to be found.

That’s how Ms. Trehan, 57, who has had several careers (in hospitality, travel, philanthropy), landed on her latest one: restaurateur. And how she happened to leave the 30th-floor apartment on Broad Street that she was sharing with her daughter, Sonia, now 23, to move into a late-19th-century brownstone in Harlem, where she could open a restaurant specializing in chai (with Indian-inspired foods like samosas, fire-roasted breads and grilled meats served on the side).

Chaiwali, as she is calling it, will be on the bottom two floors of the four-story building on Lenox Avenue near 124th Street,. Her new home, where she lives with Diego Balarezo, 49, the contractor who did the work on the building and is her romantic partner, is on the top two floors.

“Ruined grandeur” is how Ms. Trehan described the style of the restaurant, which she hopes to open in January. What does that mean exactly? Picture the décor of a family down on its luck, she said, with mismatched chairs.

Not that such a family could afford to live here. Ms. Trehan, who bought the building with her divorce settlement from Karan Trehan, an investment banker, paid $1.7 million for it last year and, so far, has spent $500,000 on renovations.

In the upstairs duplex, which she and Mr. Balarezo moved into earlier this month, Ms. Trehan said, “I wanted a jewel-box feeling of peace and celebration.”

Here, instead of coining a name for the style, she gave the rooms names: the front bedroom on the lower level of the duplex is known as Earth, the back bedroom is referred to as Heaven, and the master suite above is called Universe, she said, “because it is the umbrella for the other rooms.”

Why the names?

“I got tired of telling the movers to put that bed in the front third-floor bedroom and that bed in the fourth-floor back room,” Ms. Trehan said. “So I named them, and the names took on a life of their own.”

The rooms are decorated in her interpretation of French Colonial style, with canopied beds, chandeliers, teak-framed mirrors and plenty of chaises — a mix of new furniture and Indian antiques.

“I’m not interested in the provenance of anything,” she said. “I like French, I like Indian, I like Scandinavian and British. I like shape and texture.”

The walls either are painted white or are exposed brick that has been lightly whitewashed. If there’s a dominant color here, needless to say, it’s white.

Naturally, this is particularly pronounced in Heaven, where a 19th-century-style white campaign canopy bed is flanked by marble side tables and a voluptuously curved daybed sits beside the fireplace.

Ms. Trehan has yet to find time to lounge on that daybed, she said. Or on any of the chaises, for that matter. Starting a new career is a lot of work, and she is still perfecting her chai.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Heaven Is Down the Hall. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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