Douglas Elliman’s Eklund Gomes Team has been tapped to exclusively market 56 Walker Street, a boutique residential project in Tribeca.
The units in the historic building will all be highly automated, said developer Jason Lee from Six Sigma. For example, light switches will be replaced by iPod touch screens that control several functions in each room. Handles on kitchen cabinets and drawers have been replaced by touch sensors that activate motors. And rain sensors automatically close windows when precipitation is detected.
“The home knows your habits and it complements how you live,” Lee said.
While Lee and Eklund could not comment on the number of apartments in the building or how much they’ll cost, they did note that the apartments will range between 3,000 and 5,000 square feet in size.
This is not the first time Six Sigma has worked on a project with automated features, but it’s the first time all these features were integrated together, Lee said. He expects the building to be finished by the end of 2014 and the first units to go on sale within a year.
“We are excited that they chose us rather than other teams,” Eklund said in a brief phone interview on Wednesday. “We work with so many developers and so many buildings. It’s very exciting when someone takes a unique design approach.”
Lee picked up the 18,000-square-foot cast-iron building following a bankruptcy court’s approval of the $18 million sale in December 2013. The building’s previous owner, Guy Morris, completed a number of improvements and had planned to add a 1,900-square-foot penthouse with a 700-square foot rooftop terrace before falling into foreclosure.
