One was self-taught, his hungry, intuitive eye shaped by his years at Andy Warhol's Factory, and by curating the artist's multifarious acquisitions, creating order and beauty at Warhol's townhouse. The other was more formally (if not quite traditionally) educated, at Berkeley, Harvard and by a fresh-out-of-grad-school job as a young architect at I. M. Pei. Together, Jed Johnson and Alan Wanzenberg formed one of the most influential design partnerships of the 1980s and early 1990s, making sensuous, modern environments for celebrity and art world heavies like Richard Gere, Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, Peter and Sandy Brant, and Beth Rudin De Woody. Mr. Johnson and Mr. Wanzenberg reinvigorated Arts and Crafts pieces by mixing Stickley with Ruhlman, Fulper pottery with Jean Michel Frank. In so doing, they jump-started that decade's appetite for all things Mission, although, as the architecture critic Paul Goldberger once wrote, they not only collected furniture by Gustav Stickley and objects by Louis J. Millet, "but they knew when to stop." Their work was scholarly and passionate, an education in early-20th-century furniture and contemporary art. And nowhere was it more vivid than in their apartment on West 67th Street, a much-photographed, turn-of-the-19th-century artist's studio (albeit one with three bedrooms) filled with their signature arrangements, along with custom pieces and a liberal sprinkling of Warhols. As Mr. Goldberger said recently, the two were "an oasis of sanity amid that whole Warhol world, two of the most centered people I've known, though in very different ways." Mr. Johnson was shy in public, able to recall significant objects in a room but not the names of their owners. He was driven, a little tortured and wickedly funny if you knew him well. Mr. Wanzenberg, confident and verbal, took himself more seriously, in the way that architects sometimes do, and Mr. Johnson delighted in teasing him. They had an ornery dachshund named Gus, and a pair of houses on Fire Island. In 1996, when Mr. Johnson died in the crash of TWA Flight 800, he was 47 and Mr. Wanzenberg was 45. Seventeen years later, Mr. Wanzenberg, now 62, has fully reshaped his life, finally shedding that apartment, which he sold a year ago in September to a client, along with much of its contents, for more than $4.3 million. He is living minimally in what he calls an "unemotional" two-bedroom apartment on the 42nd floor of a bland rental building on West 60th Street that evokes nothing so much as Bob Newhart's apartment, minus Suzanne Pleshette. It is an act of downsizing that coincides with a memoir of sorts. "Journey," out last month, is a candid exploration of the people and places that have influenced Mr. Wanzenberg as an architect and a man, from Angela Davis and Christopher Alexander to the memory of a bowl of lemons placed just so in Philip Johnson's Glass House. Of Jed Johnson, he writes that when he died, Mr. Johnson was the happiest he had ever been, comfortable in himself and proud of all he had accomplished. The other day, Mr. Wanzenberg was sitting cross-legged on the sofa of his new apartment, a slight figure in a T-shirt and jeans, absent-mindedly hurling dog toys for an anxious, wire-haired dachshund puppy named Skip. Don't be fooled, she bites. "This ability to shed was 16 years in the making," he said. It holds up a mirror for people our age. Can you do it? Can you do it young enough so you still have the next phase of your life? Mr. Johnson and Mr. Wanzenberg were in the their late 20s when they bought their apartment for $325,000. "It seemed like a lot of money at the time, and we did everything we could to make it work," Mr. Wanzenberg said. We moved in sort of with nothing. When Jed died, it was horrific and chaotic and frightening, and there was also just a lot of stuff. Things I maintained out of reverence to him, and it was a lot. I did it with a certain energy and I didn't despair over it, but it was a lot. It took six years, he said, to right himself after Mr. Johnson's death. He recalled the thousands of condolence letters, many from young gay men who saw the couple as role models because they were so visible. The first year, friends like Pat Hackett, Angela Westwater and Fran Lebowitz buffered him. The second year, he isolated himself, worked too hard and brooded at home. The third year, he started going out again. Maybe at year four he started dating, though he said he was able to find fault with most of the men he met. "I remember Fran saying to me, "I'm not good at relationships, but you are. Right now, you just don't want to have a relationship. But when you're ready, you'll know how to do it." " Ten years ago, Mr. Wanzenberg met Peter Kelly, a landscape architect, during Gay Ski Week in Aspen, Colo., a match so successful, he said, that it has boosted attendance at that particular event. Over time, they have made a life in houses that look as much like them as the West 67th Street apartment was a portrait of Mr. Johnson and Mr. Wanzenberg: a bungalow in a surf town in Costa Rica; a kit house in upstate New York to camp in while they build a new house. This apartment is fitted out on a desert-island premise: If you can't take much with you, what matters most? Out of the thousands of books from West 67th Street, just a few have made the move: "Invisible Man," by Ralph Ellison; a bit of Cheever, Dorothy Parker and Truman Capote. In the living room, the sofa was designed by Mr. Wanzenberg to be a guest bed. In the monastic bedroom, there are two tiny paintings at eye level by Forrest Bess and Farrell Brickhouse, and a startling view of Lower Manhattan. "The old apartment was a very internalized space," Mr. Wanzenberg said. You lost your sense of time, which could be a good thing, particularly during my recovery. Recalling the apartments in the studio building, Mr. Goldberger said, "The best of them have decent light, but none of them have any views. So Alan is getting the one thing he never had before: a great view. The On Location column last Thursday, about the New York apartment of the designer Alan Wanzenberg, misstated the title of Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel. It is "Invisible Man," not "The Invisible Man."