In a city where money and style are a constant, it’s tough to stand out in the crowd, but don’t tell 40 Mercer Residences. This is a building born into a charmed life.
Conceived by hotelier Andr Balazs and designed by revered French architect Jean Nouvel, 40 Mercer is a boldly modern glass and steel structure in protectionist historic Soho that still received unanimous approval by the city Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2001. The New York Times called that decision one of “breathtaking importance for the future of architecture in New York.”
Now, brought to market just two months ago, the 40-unit ultraluxury condominium is more than half sold and its apartments, ranging from $2.5 million to $13.5 million, are said to be selling at the rate of one apartment every 72 hours. “Louise Sunshine tells me 40 Mercer is selling faster than anything she’s seen before,” says Balazs.
“My two buyers never saw it,” says Prudential Douglas Elliman agent Wing Fong. “We went over the details on the phone and they had full confidence. This is something you can buy through the Web because of the amenities, the design and the architecture. And the location sells itself. Soho is an area of international focus.”
And an area with next to no buildable land. “I had my eyes on it for quite a while,” Balazs says of the parking lot on Grand Street between Broadway and Mercer Street. “It was the largest open site in Soho.” Balazs has lived in the neighborhood for over 20 years.
“I envisioned it as a super-luxury hotel,” he recalls, “with the kind of public amenities that the Mercer [the hotel Balazs opened in Soho 10 years ago] just didn’t have the space for.” But when September 11 nixed any chance of getting a hotel financed in New York City, Balazs began plans for his second residential project in Manhattan, after One Kenmare Square in Nolita.
Contemplating a new building in preservationist Soho, Balazs entered into, he recalls, “the ongoing debate as to what to do inside an historic district. Do you build a faux replica of the architecture that the area is presumably protecting, like the Tribeca Grand, which is a fake version of a turn-of-the-century factory building, where the cast iron is now fiber glass? Or do you try to do something that has its origins in some other intellectual construct?”
It comes down to this, says Balazs: “What is Soho really about? Why is the cast-iron architecture important? What was it in its time? That was the intellectual basis of the building to establish a vocabulary that was in the spirit of the cast iron building that distinguishes the neighborhood.”
Soho being an intellectually and artistically attuned community, Balazs chose to put an interpretive modern building on the site, commissioning Jean Nouvel for the design. “Jean was the only architect in my mind who had this kind of muscular modernist vocabulary and he is someone who works in a highly contextual way.”
Nouvel has worked on protected UNESCO world historic sites and his Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris is a study in transparency, using glass and light to reflect and complement its Left Bank environs.
Nouvel, says Balazs, “has a kind of toughness that is necessary for Soho, which in its more recent incarnation was a mercantile district not residential. There’s nothing fine about it. It’s industrial, gritty. It’s not limestone, it’s cast iron.”
While its appearance is strikingly modern, the building’s design is anchored in historic detail. For example, recalls Balazs, “our photo research from the 1820s to 1850s showed that that block was occupied by not one singular building but by three a large department store on the Broadway side and two smaller buildings.”
That piece of history is reflected in an aspect of the façde. Says Balazs, “The building has a red side and a blue side and two-thirds down the block on Grand Street there’s a slot. It almost looks like two separate buildings. It breaks up the monolithic feel of a new building.”
The details more likely selling the apartments are the luxury amenities inside, some unprecedented, like the moveable glass walls. Balazs says he’s lived in lofts with spacious private roof gardens, “but it’s always driven me crazy that you can’t always use them,” because the air might be foul or the outside temperature too severe. “I thought it would be great if you could just expose your place when you wanted to by having these enormous glass walls, so instead of going out onto a terrace you actually open up the wall of your unit and let the air come in.” The motor-driven sliding walls, some up to 20 feet wide, are electronically controlled.
“I’m a big fan of the Tenth Street Baths,” says Balazs, so he had a bathhouse specially designed for the amenity floor, which also includes a T-shaped, 50-foot lap pool; a wood-paneled gymnasium; and a lounge with catering bar and projection screens, available for private functions.
While just three or four years ago it was the easiest place to park in the city, Soho has become impossible for drivers. “I think within 18 to 24 months,” says Balazs, “there won’t be a single parking lot in Soho.” The discreet underground parking garage for 40 Mercer required the excavation of two additional subterranean levels.
His 40 Mercer might also become known and remembered as the building with the private swimming pools. Two penthouses, one a duplex priced at $13.5 million, have 2,250-square-foot terraces with outdoor swimming pools. “These pools are going to sell the rest of the apartments,” says independent broker Fionn Campbell. “In terms of resale, they’re going to add a certain cachet to the building.”
The promotion for 40 Mercer is of a new kind, matched only by the Richard Meier towers on Charles Street and the Robert A.M. Stern-designed 15 Central Park West. Instead of a brochure, the building presents potential buyers with a finely bound and boxed illustrated book, a playful romantic graphic novella set in Soho.
The promotional materials, which are produced in-house, says Balazs, “are as important as everything. It’s the image of the building. It’s the kind of thing we do routinely for a hotel, everything from uniform design to imaging, advertising, graphic design and music.
“Hotels are a very big collaborative project,” he says. “A hotel is something you sell every single night, for years and years. A condominium sale, albeit bigger, is more dumb you do it once and you’re done.”
As close to western Chinatown as it is to the heart of Soho, Balazs predicts his building “will move Soho lower, much like the Mercer Hotel did. When I opened the hotel I was worried that no one would want to sleep in Soho because it was such a desolate neighborhood. That was just 10 years ago.”