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The ELLE DECOR A-List designer has dreamed up a model unit in the borough’s first super-tall skyscraper.

You can’t get much more “Brooklyn” than Leyden Lewis. The ELLE DECOR A-List interior designer, the son of immigrants from Trinidad and Tobago, grew up in the Crown Heights neighborhood and today keeps his eponymous design practice in the borough. As a kid, Lewis recalls watching kung fu movies and running errands with his parents in downtown Brooklyn. Visits to the bank—a grand, echoing edifice clad in gleaming marble— particularly stood out. “I remember being kind of flustered, being dragged into this bank, and being like, Where are we? Why are we standing in line?” Lewis remembers.

The bank was the Dime Savings Bank, a 1908 landmark that is now adjoined to Brooklyn’s can’t-miss architectural addition: a 1,066-foot-tall residential skyscraper. Designed by SHoP Architects and developed by the real estate company JDS Development Group, the Brooklyn Tower is the borough’s first super-tall building. And, in what feels like a full-circle moment, Lewis has designed one of the skyscraper’s model units. “How often do you get to participate in your own history through design?” he asks. “I really tried to represent what I would do if I were living in this space and honor that history.”

Celebrating the spirit of Brooklyn is central to the design of the unit, an 880-square-foot one-bedroom apartment perched on the tower’s 56th floor. The compact layout, complete with an awkward column abutting the kitchen, was admittedly tricky, but Lewis embraced the challenge. “People produce model apartments because they might be complicated to understand how to furnish,” Lewis says. “We wanted to add a little Leyden Lewis Design Studio jazz to it, but at the same time we wanted it to be functional.”

As soon as you step inside, you understand what that jazz is all about. The apartment conjures an urbane Brooklynite, with its gold-toned accent wall, dramatically curved sofa (a custom Lewis design), and vivid works by local artists like Billy Gerard Frank, Malene Barnett, and Meghan Brady. Through an expanse of floor-to-ceiling glass windows, the borough unfurls below.

Those vertiginous views provided yet another unique challenge, per Lewis: “For some people, living in a tower comes intuitively. But I think there are going to be individuals who have lived on much lower levels, if not a house, who are going to be like, ‘Can we live in a tower?’ ”

To ground the space, Lewis incorporated warm materials, low-slung furnishings, and artful layers wherever possible. A custom wood counter designed by Nico Yektai wraps around a corner near the kitchen (the interior architecture was helmed by fellow ELLE DECOR A-List design studio Gachot), a move that adds an organic touch amid all the glass but is also a clever space-saving tactic. As for that pesky column? Lewis covered it in mirrors, an effect that makes the column virtually disappear—with the added bonus of reflecting the views out the window.

The bedroom, meanwhile, is clad in a tactile cork wallcovering from Holly Hunt. The bed, another custom Lewis creation, recalls Japanese silhouettes (an obsession of Lewis’s that he attributes to all of those martial-arts movies) and is flanked by two glamorous Murano glass sconces. An undulating window seat made from lustrous African mahogany is the perfect venue for curling up with a book or admiring the toy-size Manhattan Bridge.

And just who, exactly, is this home in the sky designed for? According to Lewis, they’re art collectors, journalists, polyglots, travelers, partiers: “These people are us.”