You may not be John Jacob Astor at Beechwood Mansion or have a crew of uniformed servants, but that doesn’t mean your housekeeper, nanny or au pair doesn’t need a few more square feet.
Developers at several über-luxury Manhattan buildings are not just breaking records on sales prices, but, in some cases, also selling second apartments to buyers who want their staffs to live an elevator ride away.
“I wish I had more of them. I didn’t build enough,” said president of Skyline Developers, Orin Wilf, referring to his latest project at 170 East End Avenue, where owners will start moving in the next few months. “We had nine and we sold all nine.”
Wilf said the apartments, which range from 400 to 500 square feet and cost between $750,000 to $850,000, are available only to those who are purchasing their own units in the building. He said it was an especially good fit for the ground floor of his building, where zoning restrictions precluded retail from moving in.
For owners in ultra-exclusive buildings like Wilf’s and 15 Central Park West, where residents started moving in last month, owners have already plunked down millions, and the additional cash may be nothing more than a financial footnote. But brokers note that even if second apartments become more common, they will be limited to buildings where owners are paying tens of millions of dollars.
“When you see product of that level and that caliber, you are going to see apartments like these being offered,” said Chris Poore, vice president at the Corcoran Group.
Poore, who recently sold a studio for nearly $700,000 at the Cielo on 83rd and York to a resident who wanted an apartment for a caretaker, said, “You are talking about the crème de la crème.”
The phenomenon of separate living quarters for staff is, obviously, not new. The second studios in new luxury buildings are a reincarnation of a feature that has long existed in high-end prewar buildings, where staff lived within the apartment.
Many pre-war apartments were, however, stripped of staff quarters and divided into separate units. “In the classic prewar apartments, the servant’s quarters were always in the apartments, generally back off the butler’s pantry, behind the kitchen, and accessed through a separate entrance,” says James Gricar, executive vice president and director of sales at Brown Harris Stevens. Now, he said, luxury buildings are putting them on lower floors.
Developers say there may be more “nanny suites” of second apartment offices coming on the market as buildings get more economical with space.
“I think you are going to see developers reverting back to find more things that people will use instead of what they’ve tried, like bowling alleys and volleyball courts,” Wilf said.