The décor of Helene Luchnick’s home is best described as antique chic. Amid the plants and bric-a-brac that hang from the ceiling and crowd the floor in the living room, it’s difficult to notice the trendy Sub-Zero fridge.
Also distracting is the stunning view outside her Dumbo loft apartment. The picture window looks down on the Brooklyn Bridge roadway, which slices across the entire frame, toward the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan.
Luchnick, a veteran broker at the vanguard of loft sales in the mid-1980s, takes a low-key, bemused approach toward her taste in vintage furnishings — and vintage spaces.
“The term ‘loft’ is thrown around a lot to connote high ceilings and open space, but the true definition is commercial space converted to residential use,” she said. “I like the authenticity of it; they’re not boxy. You want to be surprised when you walk in. It’s about keeping the original beams and concrete pillars.”
Luchnick’s taste in décor reflects her career in real estate. Like many brokers, she got into the business after pursuing other vocations, and is now an executive vice president at Prudential Douglas Elliman.
Both Helene and her husband, Alan, said the couple’s urge to collect and restore reflects nostalgia for a vanished New York, and Helene’s real estate dealings have helped give new luster to once-forgotten neighborhoods. She started out in Soho, then moved on to Tribeca and Chelsea in Manhattan, then set her sights on Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Fort Greene in Brooklyn. Her specialty still lies in discovering new neighborhoods, where she plays a role in sprucing up buildings that will draw million-dollar buyers to areas once considered out of bounds.
Of course, in its way, Dumbo remains a funky fringe neighborhood with lots of cachet. Land is scarce and the boundaries are small and finite, since it’s hemmed in by the river, the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Navy Yard.
At home, an assemblage of artifacts greets visitors gradually in the hallway, where dozens of empty wooden picture frames line the floor.
“You never know when you’re going to need them,” said Alan, though with the pictures that already cover the wall and the other items jockeying for space, it’s unclear where they would go if they did contain a photo or painting.
The main room, which melds dining space and living room, resembles a museum, except for the hands-on policy. Like a proud father showing off a child’s talent, Alan flips the switch on a circa 1909 Violano-Virtuoso parlor cabinet, which lights up as it plays a piano and a slightly dissonant violin part. The permanent exhibition also features Edison phonographs and Wurlitzer jukeboxes.
In a corner, under glass, sits an 1870s stock ticker with tape. A large stained-glass window in a wooden frame hovers above, artfully suspended from the ceiling. They got it while scavenging for gems upstate in Newburgh, when they came across a building under demolition, scaled a substantial fence and “pried off the entire frame with a crowbar,” Alan said.
The same aesthetic that transforms an item from the rubbish heap into a valuable antique has helped Helene divine the hot new neighborhood, where she has swooped in with uncanny timing long before others have even located it on a map. But she is not averse to selling in new buildings located in old neighborhoods, including Schaefer Landing on the Williamsburg waterfront.
She and Alan had an old-fashioned courtship, and have cultivated a taste for nostalgic objects that eventually put Helene on her career path. She grew up in Sheepshead Bay, he in Flatbush. They met through mutual friends in their mid-teens and married after graduating college. They have one daughter, Nikki, who lives in Atlanta but “always has a bedroom in Brooklyn,” Helene said.
Early in their marriage, in the 1970s, the couple rented in Trump Village, a Mitchell-Lama complex built by Fred Trump in Brighton Beach. After a stint as a schoolteacher, a job she disliked, she quit to work as a stripper — not the risqué kind, but one that refinished furniture and did other jobs that required elbow grease and a willingness to get her hands dirty.
Antiquing served as her entry into real estate. In 1981, the Luchnicks looked for a Soho storefront to sell Wurlitzer jukeboxes, although the area was considered a dangerous neighborhood at the time. They answered an ad in the Village Voice, and the landlord’s request for $2,500 a month rent floored her. She figured they’d be better off buying a five-story building nearby at 125 Greene Street, just south of Houston Street, where Alan would run his antiques store from the first floor and they would live on the third floor.
Interest rates were around 18 percent at the time, so to help cover the $500,000 price tag, Helene got creative. “I found a lawyer who told me how to co-op a building,” she said, “something that was rarely done in those days,” but which allowed her to apportion the building’s cost among several parties rather than force the Luchnicks to assume the entire cost and rent out the space. “Then he said, ‘Good luck.'”
She enlisted a broker to sell the remaining apartments, but quickly found three buyers herself. The broker ended up hiring her to sell other lofts downtown. In 1983, one of Alan’s customers who worked for Douglas Elliman Knight Frank, the firm’s commercial arm, was offered the exclusive on a huge loft building in Greenwich Village.
At the time, no large firm had a Downtown office, and the connection with Alan’s client led to an introduction to the head of Douglas Elliman Gibbons & Ives, as it was called at that time. That led to an offer for Helene to start up the company’s Downtown division from an Uptown office.
The Luchnicks, who still own the Greene Street ground-level retail space and the third-floor apartment, were among the first residential pioneers to live in Soho, helping the artist community there jump-start the neighborhood’s revitalization.
“At that time, you couldn’t get a cab there, and you couldn’t get a cab to take you there,” Alan said. “It was scary to wake up to find three guys sleeping in your doorway when you have a 5-year-old daughter.”
After selling individual listings through the lean years of the late 1980s and early 1990s, she moved into the company’s Flatiron District office in 1992 and began entering into exclusive partnerships with developers on condo conversions in Tribeca and Chelsea, which were then gritty neighborhoods on the cusp of being discovered by real estate bargain hunters.
For her first project, the Spears Building at 525 West 22nd Street, completed in 1996, she quickly sold 30 luxury condominiums, but fame in real estate circles came after her association with the New Museum building in Soho. “It was a 12-story loft with pigeons as the only tenant, and we put in two lofts per floor … when it sold, the press and the celebrities followed,” she said. “It made my reputation.”
Those celebs included David Bowie, Cate Blanchett, Rupert Murdoch and Russell Simmons, among others.
“Before the mid-1990s, this had never happened before — to have people go out and buy a vacant building and develop it as a loft conversion or knock it down for a new building,” she said.
She consulted with developers regarding layout, finishes, pricing and marketing for other conversions in fringe neighborhoods, moved into Williamsburg ahead of the curve and offered exclusive listings there, including Schaefer Landing. Her latest, an 18-story condo at 20 Bayard Street, located at McCarren Park along the Greenpoint border, has four units left ranging from a two-bedroom at $1.195 million to a one-bedroom at $660,000.
Now, she plans to push the envelope again in Fort Greene, a brownstone neighborhood with “room to build,” she said. Her two-building garden condominium, Clermont Greene, launched last month and is priced in the low $700s per square foot.
Luchnick has timed the rise and fall of the neighborhoods where she’s lived as well, moving into Dumbo just when it became hot, which coincided with Soho becoming passé. For her, over-the-top gentrification served as a key factor for relocating.
“There aren’t many art galleries left there,” she said.
So in 2000, they moved, figuring they’d be better off leasing the retail space that housed Alan’s antiques business to a more well-heeled tenant and renting the apartment for $4,000 a month.
They ended up in Dumbo after the couple took a trip to stroll the streets. She liked the park along the East River. He began reminiscing about his teenage friend whose father owned a warehouse where all the liquor that poured into the port was stored before it got tax stamps, and recalled the days in the 1960s when he had to dodge trains that traversed the tracks embedded into the cobblestone streets.
“I have loved this building since high school,” Alan said, referring to the converted office building from the 1880s where they now live. We were looking to buy, and were just taking a walk in Dumbo and noticed they were doing a conversion.”
They might have gotten the place for just over $500,000, but when the attorney general approved the offering, the price went to $605,000. Out of professional courtesy, the broker allowed Luchnick to co-broker herself on the deal, which came with a tax abatement. After a buyer backed out, they also got the same view from a higher floor than the one they initially signed up for.
“It felt comfortable, and I knew our stuff would fit in here,” she said. “I like the quaintness; it’s a small neighborhood compared to Soho.” The couple also has a home in East Hampton that contains far fewer antiques than their main lair.
Dumbo is isolated, but the neighborhood is happening. On a typical weekday last month, a film crew taped a segment for hot TV show “Gossip Girl,” and a jazz saxophonist blew a solo while posing for promo shots.
Wedding parties jam the park at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge on weekends, and retail space is beginning to fill up. In 2000, parking cost $90 a month; now, it’s $325. And their view is threatened by proposed new construction.
Even with the encroachment on their paradise from the past, they agree: “This is it.” Home.