Manhattan

We're not quite sure what type of home we imagined Rachael Ray would be living in, but we definitely envisioned her kitchen to be way bigger. Ray, who is celebrating the 10th season of her talk show this year, as well as a mega-media empire that includes everything from cookbooks to pet food, recently invited the Journal into her home for an exclusive video tour of the adorable East Village abode she shares with husband John Cusimano and her pitbull, Isaboo. Though her property is six stories tall, it measures a mere 1,800 square feet (definitely small by celeb standards) with just one room per floor. And her kitchen? It's only big enough for a half-pivot! “When people come over for the first time to my apartment, I think they’re shocked at how tiny my kitchen is,” the award-winning celeb chef muses in the video.
Take the video tour here

September 24, 2015

Live Your Versailles Fantasies in This Gilded Upper East Side Mansion for $60K/Month

By Michelle Cohen

There are undoubtedly many grand mansions of this kind in the rarified environs of the Upper East Side, some even grander and gold-er–but they don't pop up among the rental listings too often. This triplex palace at 10 East 62nd Street is clearly in search of someone who is looking to make an impression. The rental bill is steep at $60,000 a month, but, again, there are plenty of big-ticket rentals around. What you're getting for your monthly outlay is less about substance than it is about 5,600 square feet of gold-and-marble-covered, let-them-eat-cake opulence–in addition to four bedrooms, two living rooms, two kitchens, and an elevator, just to start with. The home has been on and off the rental market for several years–on the last go-round it was asking $48k (which is still in the listing title, though the listing body names the higher rent), and that was just a year ago. So whomever's behind the pricing has faith in the city's booming economy.
More of this gilded palace

Distinctive Homes

September 24, 2015

Extell’s Church-Encroaching 10th Avenue Tower Tops Out, New Interior Renderings Revealed

By Ondel Hylton

With the opening of the 7 train extension earlier this month, things are finally starting to look up for Manhattan's far West Side–literally. Hudson Yard's Coach Tower is nearing its 900-foot apex, and Gary Barnett's Extell Development has topped off construction on its 610-foot high skyscraper at 555 Tenth Avenue. Extell's rental/dormitory project anchors a full block-front between West 40th and 41st streets, and cozies up next to (and above) the neo-gothic Church of Saints Cyril & Methodius and Saint Raphael, from which the savvy developer purchased 140,000 square feet of air rights from in 2012 for $16.5 million. According to previous reports, Barnett obtained the rights to build on the 18,000 square-foot parcel after signing a 99-year ground lease from the estate of Sol Goldman in 2011. The $480 million project is partly financed by means of $100 million from EB5 equity investors.
find out more here

September 24, 2015

This Oh-So-Sweet Co-Op in Greenwich Village Is on the Market for $2 Million

There's simply nothing to hate about this Greenwich Village co-op, located in the charming pre-war building 140 West 10th Street on a lovely leafy street. The apartment still has its historic details intact, some nicely done renovations, and big windows with views over the surrounding townhouses and backyards. The only thing we're not crazy about? The steep asking price of $2.295 million.
See the rest

Distinctive Homes

September 24, 2015

Bright Harlem Apartment Features Transformative Rooms and Is Wheelchair Accessible

By Rebecca Paul

6sqft often covers space-saving design and multi-functional furniture, but it's not everyday that we get to share interior design and architecture that has the potential to significantly impact someone's quality of life. However, the renovation of this 1,500-square-foot Harlem apartment, led by the architecture firm Ten to One, is a great example of this type of universal design. The apartment was designed to provide distinct access for a family member who is in a wheelchair. The redesign features clever architectural detailing that gives each room the ability to blend together or be separate and surfaces that can act as figures or enclosures. It also introduced a system of walls and ceilings that cut through the existing structure to expose new depths.
Check it out

September 23, 2015

Rent Jessica Chastain’s Sparkling Greenwich Village Duplex for $11,500 a Month

While the home doesn't quite compare to her spectacular new spread at the Osborne, Jessica Chastain's former digs at 250 Mercer Street are certainly nothing to sneeze at. According to TODAY, the Oscar-nominated actress has put the duplex she left for Leonard Bernstein's old home on the rental market, asking a cool $11,500 a month. Described by its listing as "Exceptional in every way," the two-bedroom has been fully renovated and offers tons of luxurious finishes, and above all, a pretty sweet location in the heart of the Village.
Take a look inside

September 23, 2015

Enormous Greenwich Village Loft Above an Art House Cinema Awaits Your Vision

By Michelle Cohen

This raw-edged, sprawling 3,250 square-foot loft at 34 West 13th Street, on a bustling yet somehow old-school Greenwich Village street is on the market for the first time since the building became a cooperative in the 1970s. Formerly an acting school–there are two stages built in, which could be kind of cool if you're the theatrical type–the space is currently configured as a two bedroom with a laundry room, a big open kitchen/dining room, a living area and a hall gallery. Located between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, it's above the Quad Cinema indie theater (set to reopen with a big renovation this fall), which is also great if you love the movies. The ask is $5.25 million, and there are several suggested floor plans (see the photo gallery ahead), should you want to create a three- or four-bedroom home.
Find out more about this huge loft space

Distinctive Homes

September 23, 2015

$7.4 Million Noho Loft Wins Award for Coolest Windows Ever

What's a loft apartment without the big windows? In this case, at a co-op for sale in Noho, windows are everything. Located inside Bleecker Tower at 644 Broadway, it's a sprawling, open loft with floor-to-ceiling arched windows reaching 13 feet high and spanning 20 feet wide. That's paired with upgrades and restorations to the space, which was formerly known as the Manhattan Savings Institute bank building when it was built in 1898. As a residence, it's so impressive that it won the American Institute of Architects award for Outstanding Interiors in 2015. And you can now own it for $7.495 million.
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Distinctive Homes

September 22, 2015

SHoP’s Billionaires’ Row Supertall Gets a Spectacular Real-Life Mockup

Rendering versus reality? SHoP can certainly boast that the real thing will look as good, if not better, than the drawings they've put out. Yesterday afternoon, JDS Development Instagrammed (h/t Curbed) an amazing shot of a scale model facade of their ultra-skinny tower going up at 111 West 57th Street. The mockup features the same materials and finishes that will be applied to the actual construction, and by any stretch of the imagination, if you multiply this beauty's terracotta, glass, and bronze filigree to its 1,428-foot potential, it will certainly be one of the city's most striking buildings. Who says architects don't care about detail anymore?
More this way

Architecture And Design

September 22, 2015

Jude Law’s Former Greenwich Village Penthouse in Gorgeous Church Conversion Asks $12.5M

Remember all that hoopla over Jude Law flinging fruit from his Greenwich Village penthouse onto ogling NYU students? Well, here's where it happened, ironically, in a former house of worship. Built in 1860 as a Methodist church, 135 West 4th Street underwent an incredible condo conversion by FLAnk Architecture in 2006, where they beautifully preserved original church features such as stained glass windows and exposed beams, but added all the modern luxuries an A-list celeb would want. The aforementioned penthouse first sold for $6 million to entrepreneur Mark Kress and was then listed for resale for $8.5 million in 2009. It ended up selling the following year for a much-reduced $6.3 million, and then found a renter in Jude Law. Now, the duplex is back on the market asking $12,495,000, and it can be all yours (assuming you keep your orange lobbing at bay).
Check out the entire pad

September 22, 2015

Downtown’s Beekman Residences Tower Is Ready for Its Crowns – Now 50 Percent Sold

By Ondel Hylton

Rising from the birthplace of the romantic skyscraper, a svelte 51-story condominium known as the Beekman Residences will soon receive its twin pyramidal crowns. The to-be-illuminated, open-air pinnacles will bring the building's 599-foot roof height up an additional 51 feet, granting us skyline-watchers a new silhouette to gaze upon. While the tower's height is unremarkable in today's world of kilometer-high skyscrapers (it's only the 24th tallest building now under construction in the city), its peculiar design and prominent location overlooking Park Row is sure to add to the exceptional urban room created by the variously-styled towers surrounding City Hall Park.
More details ahead

September 22, 2015

A Gigantic Duplex Loft Is Priced at $14.95 Million in SoHo

When it comes to this condo listing at 158 Mercer Street in SoHo, it is go big or go home. The apartment is actually a combination of two units, making for a duplex with an impressive 7,000 (!) square feet. Throw in five bedrooms, six bathrooms, and direct elevator access, and you've got one very fancy, very huge loft apartment. As you may guess, something like this doesn't come cheap. It's now on the market for $14.95 million.
Take a look

Distinctive Homes

September 22, 2015

Andy Cohen Picks Up Fourth Co-op in West Village Building, Is Now Neighbors With Sally Field

The "Real Housewives" franchise must be doing well, because Bravo brainchild Andy Cohen has picked up a fourth apartment in his West Village building, 2 Horatio Street. And his latest buy, a $900,000 studio, makes him next door neighbors with none other than Sally Field, reports Variety. According to the source, Cohen's other real estate holdings in the pre-war co-op include a high-floor studio that he bought in 2003 for an unknown sum, a not-contiguous two-bedroom unit on the same floor that he bought in 2010 (and which was photographed for the New York Times) and another two-bedroom, directly above the one previously mentioned, for which he shelled out $2.6 million in 2014. His most recent acquisition is directly next door to the 2014 pad. Though this sounds a bit like a game of Jenga, we're sure there's a method to the reality guru's madness.
See the studio interior

September 21, 2015

VIDEO: The History of the Upper East Side Mansion Where the Pope Is Staying

Talk surrounding the Pope's Upper East Side crash pad has been mainly focused on street closures and insane security precautions, but this video by Regis High School (h/t Carl Quintanilla) provides the interesting history of the townhouse, providing a behind-the-scenes look at Pope Francis' "home away from Rome." Built in 1894, 20 East 72nd Street was originally home to Julia Murphy Grant, daughter of U.S. Senator Edward Murphy of New York, and Hugh J. Grant, the youngest man ever elected mayor of New York City. When Grant died in 1910, he left behind a $9 million estate to his wife. Being devoutly Catholic, she used the money to establish Regis High School before her death in 1944. In 1975, their son Hugh Grant, Jr. donated his parents' former home to the Archdiocese of New York. Since then, it's been the home of the Vatican's representative to the United Nations, and beginning with Pope John Paul II’s visit to New York City in 1979, it has served as the official residence of visiting pontiffs.
Watch the video here

History

September 21, 2015

Units Finally Hit the Market at Jean Nouvel’s MoMA Tower

The time has finally come. After years of setbacks and teasers, units at Jean Nouvel's 1,050-foot-tall MoMA Tower, now officially known as 53W53, have hit the market. Nine listings (out of 139) went up on Corcoran, according to Curbed, ranging from a $3.17 million one-bedroom 19th-floor unit to a $50.9 million four-bedroom, 63rd-floor unit. When construction started earlier this year, rumor had it that the listings wouldn't be made public, but now that we know otherwise, we've got plenty of floorplan porn to ogle, as well as lots more interior renderings courtesy of designer Thierry Despont.
Renderings and floorplans right this way

September 18, 2015

Alec Baldwin Sells One of His Devonshire House Apartments for $2.1M

We've started to wonder what ever happened to Alec Baldwin's grand exit from NYC (remember that NY Mag article/tirade?), but city records released today show he's finally sold one of his Devonshire House apartments, so perhaps his move to LA has commenced. Baldwin owns a penthouse in the Greenwich Village building, a unit next door, and the recently unloaded eighth-floor one bedroom. He bought this last unit in 2013 for $2.25 million, listed it in March for $2.35 million, but only sold it for $2.1 million (maybe he really wants to get out of here).
See more of Baldwin's pad

September 18, 2015

SHoP Architects Are Bringing a Wooden Condo Building to Chelsea

In March, an Austrian architecture firm announced plans to build the world's tallest wooden skyscraper in Vienna. They noted that by using wood as opposed to concrete they'd save 3,086 tons of CO2 emissions. Then, a study showed that timber buildings actually cost less to build. These benefits really must have stuck with SHoP Architects, who are developing plans for a ten-story residential building in Chelsea, overlooking the High Line at 475 West 18th Street, that will be made entirely of wood, according to the Wall Street Journal. SHoP's project came via a competition hosted by the United States Department of Agriculture, in partnership with the Softwood Lumber Board and the Binational Softwood Lumber Council, that asked architecture firms to design buildings at least 80 feet tall that employed wood construction technologies. SHoP's design, dubbed 475 West, won the competition along with a 12-story building in Portland. The firms will split a $3 million prize to "embark on the exploratory phase of their projects, including the research and development necessary to utilize engineered wood products in high-rise construction."
More on the project here

September 17, 2015

This Nomad Loft Was Created With Curbside Finds, Elbow Grease and an Eye for Beauty

By Michelle Cohen

There was a time in NYC when there wasn't an expectation that an apartment or loft come with a full set of shiny new appliances and amenities; you could carve out a space for yourself over time, and end up with a beautiful, unique and comfortable home. That's about the time–1977, to be exact–when the owners of this cool and crafty Nomad loft, then a recent co-op conversion, bought it for $50,000 and moved in. Now this large two-bedroom 12th floor loft with a private terrace is on the rental market for $8,000 a month. The owners–she was an art historian who passed away about a year ago, he's a retired biophysicist–and their daughter had always been fond of the excitement of scavenging what others left behind–like a six-burner restaurant stove and what is now a veritable jungle of plants. The building had been used for light manufacturing, and the couple had to design the entire 1,620-square-foot space to make it a home. Since the space was completely raw, they could configure it any way they pleased. The loft was featured in a 2006 article in the Times, in which the home's late owner and main design force is described as having "a gimlet eye for the gorgeous."
Take a look around, this way...

September 17, 2015

New Details of Tribeca’s Mysterious Skybridge House Emerge, Including Floorplan

Details were scarce when it was announced last week that one of Manhattan's last sky bridges was coming to the market. As it turns out, the property, which spans 9 Jay Street and 67 Hudson #3AB, is a pocket listing being marketed by brokers Ryan Serhant and Kaptan Unugur of Nestseekers. Tribeca Citizen, however, was able to score the floor plan of the massive home, and a pretty nifty rendering offering color-coded a street view of what you'd be buying—if you were to snap up the home, which is going for a reported $30 million.
See more here

September 17, 2015

Sleek Tribeca Loft Redesign Features Undulating Walls and Inspiring Idea Lab

By Rebecca Paul

This Tribeca loft is situated on the sixth floor of an eight-story building in Manhattan. The space measures 3,500 square feet and in 2014 it underwent a complete interior renovation led by the design team at Voorsanger Architects. The exterior of the existing building was also recently updated but its renovation was meant to replicate the historic character of the former industrial neighborhood. What we see on the inside of this loft is a far different approach.
READ MORE

Distinctive Homes

September 17, 2015

New York Public Library Hires Dutch Architecture Firm Mecanoo to Lead Renovation

On Tuesday, news surfaced that eight architecture firms were being considered for the redesign of the New York Public Library's main branch, the landmarked Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street, one of whom was starchitect Bjarke Ingels. The list also included Ennead Architects, Studio Gang Architects, and Robert A.M. Stern Architects. One name that wasn't mentioned, however, was the Dutch firm Mecanoo, but the New York Times is reporting that the architects from the Netherlands have been selected by the library to lead the $300 million renovation, which also includes a complete overhaul of the Mid-Manhattan branch at Fifth Avenue and 40th Street.
More details ahead

Architecture And Design

September 17, 2015

This $17.5 Million Co-Op at the Dakota Has Gone Totally Mod!

While many of the apartments at The Dakota, the historic co-op building at 1 West 72nd Street on the Upper West Side, are dripping with historic detail, this one is an anomaly. The four-bedroom unit does retain many of the classic details of these famed apartments—12-foot ceilings, wood-burning fireplaces, floor-to-ceiling windows and grand, well-sized rooms. But it's been significantly renovated with bold, modern design in the kitchen and bedrooms. To have a touch of modernism in one of the most iconic and historic apartment buildings of New York is going to cost you $17.5 million. The unit last sold in 2010, for $11.5 million.
See it all

Distinctive Homes

September 17, 2015

First Renderings of Moshe Safdie’s 800-Foot Bancroft Building Replacement Revealed

Plans for the Bancroft Building have been ultra-hush with much speculation swirling around the design that would ultimately replace the recently demolished, and much beloved, landmark building. But now, the NY Post has the first official rendering of the luxury condo tower that could rise in place of the historic structure located on a block-through site between West 29th and West 30th streets. Though 6sqft was previously told by reps of the development that the rendering seen here was in no way an affiliated project, the two designs do remain visually similar.
more details here

September 17, 2015

Mats Zuccarello Is Second NY Rangers Player This Week to Scoop Up a Downtown Condo

We're not sure how "the Rags" are going to do on the ice this year, but they sure will have some nice digs to come home to. Just yesterday, we learned that New York Rangers center Derick Brassard scored a $4.1 million condo at One York Street in Tribeca. And today, the Observer reports that the team's right wing, and perhaps THE fan favorite, Mats Zuccarello has picked up a $3.15 million pad at 345 West 14th Street in the Meatpacking District. Zucc's new condo is spread out over 1,228 square feet and offers two bedrooms, views of Gansevoort Square, and high-end finishes.
Have a look around

September 16, 2015

Back in ’68 an East Village Hippy Ran for President Against Nixon

Before there was the wild presidential run of Donald Trump, there was another absurd (albeit much more endearing) campaign by an East Village hippy looking for political greatness. A fun and fascinating recollection by Ephemeral NY tells the tale of Louis Albolafia, a 27-year-old abstract expressionist artist, nudist, and the first person to establish a runaway shelter and hotline in New York, who ran on the "Love" party ticket. Though Albolafia was obviously not the term winner (that title goes to Richard Nixon), he did get a considerable number of write-ins during the race.
Find out more about his campaign here

History

September 16, 2015

NY Rangers Star Derick Brassard Scores a $4M Tribeca Condo