During preliminary examinations, 1890s architectural details have turned up behind modern walls, like classical pilasters and stained-glass windows with purple, gold and ocher petals.
Rooms now have a formal feel, with Biedermeier-style wood furnishings and rose-colored marble sink counters, but will soon get a makeover when new gold and ocher-toned carpeting, bedspreads, drapes and wallpaper will be installed.
Over by Aqueduct Racetrack, vines and a dense tree canopy appear to be devouring the platform: green vengeance, soon to turn crimson, ocher, gold.
Curious passers-by on West 63rd Street have been welcomed inside by doormen to admire (or cluck about) the refurbishment of the two-story lobby with a deliberately '50s kitsch sensibility, in a palette of gold and bronze, ocher and chocolate, zebra stripes and leopard spots.
One wall still displays the original ocher and gold wallpaper.
The main room, the carpeted dining room, is decorated in lots of ocher and gold, with more formal furniture and a huge glass-front wine cabinet that takes up most of one wall.
But inside Brigitte Stora's apartment was an explosion of scarlet, ocher and flame gold, of Israeli and North African textiles, of pottery and a brass menorah.
In "Neil Young: Heart of Gold," the colors shift from ocher to shades of blue as the mood shifts from plaintive to rueful.
The menorah, he said, was painted a particular yellow ocher "that would have looked like gold from far away".
The Buddhists — dressed in heavy ocher robes, their heads shaved — also visited the Catholic church in January, and a local priest attended a service at the temple for Lunar New Year, beneath the benevolent gaze of a 10-foot-tall Buddha sculptured in white Burmese jade and detailed in gold leaf and gemstones.
