The Lucy Drexel Dahlgren House is a historic home located at 15 East 96th Street. It was built in 1915-16, and was designed by Ogden Codman, Jr. in the French Renaissance Revival style. Codman, Jr, with the novelist Edith Wharton, authored The Decoration of Houses (1897), a well-respected manual on interior design that criticized Victorian interior design as heavy, poorly planned, and wasteful of space. The wealthy and socially prominent Lucy Drexel Dahlgren spent little time in her house at 15 East 96th Street. Apparently, Dahlgren rented the house to the French jeweler Pierre Cartier from 1922 until she sold it to him in 1927. In 1945, on his retirement, Cartier sold the house to the Roman Catholic Church of St. Francis de Sales (135 East 96th Street), which used it as a convent for the nuns who taught at the church's parochial school. In 1981 the church sold the house to a private owner, who restored it.