The challenge wasn't just that two balconies had worn smooth. It was that some of the surviving ornament wasn't original either.

After 140 years of Manhattan weather, three sandstone balconies on the Villard Houses, McKim, Mead & White's 1882 Renaissance Revival landmark on Madison Avenue, now the Lotte New York Palace Hotel, had lost nearly all carved detail. But earlier restoration interventions in plaster and concrete had also quietly replaced sections of the original stonework, and those repairs had since weathered into the facade alongside everything else. Accepting the surviving ornament at face value would have reproduced the wrong thing.

Monumental Labs treated the project as forensic reconstruction. We scanned surviving panels across the full façade, identified which motifs reflected the original 1880s carving and which were later interventions, and cross-referenced historic photographs to reconstruct McKim, Mead & White's actual decorative language. Only then did fabrication begin.

The replacement panels, floral and medallion reliefs in matching sandstone, were robotically milled from digitally reconstructed models and hand-finished to restore the surface depth, asymmetry, and tool-mark texture of the 1884 originals. First-review approval from the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. The methodology is now the established template for ongoing restoration at the complex.