Broker Jacky Teplitzky has seen her star rise at Prudential Douglas Elliman, culminating with her recent snagging of the firm’s award for top sales group. She recently moved into an Upper East Side apartment uniquely designed to complement the needs of her brokerage career as well as her family life.
Teplitzky worked with her husband, Max Dobens, a broker on her sales team, to convert the interior of their modern condo in Maison East at 1438 Third Avenue and 81st Street to be reminiscent of a prewar apartment, with a distinct separation between public and private space.
The 2,427-square-foot apartment, which they moved into with their two sons in January, has a wide gallery ending in a foyer that leads into an expansive, open living room and dining area in one direction and into a wing with four bedrooms and a home office in the other.
“I like the prewar layout, but I don’t necessarily like prewar buildings,” said Teplitzky, whose design taste also runs toward a distinctive blend of classic and contemporary. “Most of the apartments in prewar buildings are dark, and they don’t have many windows. I love light and sun.”
The apartment, which according to public records closed for $3.15 million, is an upgrade for the couple. It is significantly bigger than their old apartment, which was around the corner on 84th and First Avenue. And Teplitzky discovered it on the job while selling units there.
The road to top sales group has not been a linear one for Teplitzky. She was born in Chile and moved to Israel as a young girl after her father, a soccer player, competed in a tournament there and became enamored with the county. She served as a sergeant in the Israeli army as a teenager and then went to work for a tourism company.
When she moved to New York, she was working in tourism and got into real estate by happenstance: After she and Dobens purchased their first apartment, the broker told her she would make a good agent because she was a tough negotiator. She started out at MLBKaye International Realty and then moved to the Corcoran Group, where her husband joined her team, before starting at Prudential Douglas Elliman, where she has not only made a name for herself through sales, but has also aggressively courted publicity to
become a boldface name.
And she is using her apartment to further advance her success. She has already started entertaining clients there, despite the fact that she just finished decorating last month. She’s hosted dinner for a client from Ireland as well as for all the people she sold apartments to in the building.
Dobens, who has extensive experience in townhouse sales, made some structural alterations to the 24th-floor apartment, which has a number of large windows facing north, east and west along with three balconies, including a wrap-around. One of the key changes he made to the unit was closing off entrances to the kitchen and the dining room from the bedrooms to create some separation.
“Max was actually the architect of this apartment,” Teplitzky said. “I spent more time on the design.”
With the kitchen opening into the dining and living room areas, the apartment is used to entertain as many as 20 people at a time.
“One thing that was critical for Jacky and me was a proper formal dining room,” Dobens said. “I say ‘formal dining room,’ but there are not really walls per se. The dining room is separated from the kitchen by a counter and some hanging cabinets. The kitchen, living room and dining room are one big loft-like area, and that’s a key factor in the way we live and entertain.”
But even this airy, contemporary space has a prewar touch: The couple added crown moldings, which actually hang off the ceiling at the windows, to delineate the borders of the dining and living rooms. The moldings have the visual effect of making the postwar ceilings seem much higher than they actually are, Teplitzky said.
Teplitzky worked closely with interior designer Jeannine Williams to create a multipurpose area that could be used by the family but also serve as an elegant entertaining space. The focal point of the room — a blend of soft greens, yellows, oranges, reds and touches of blue — is a chandelier that Teplitzky had custom-made by craftsman Arthur Baruch by combining two chandeliers.
“[I] spent the first five years of my life with my grandparents,” she said. “The only thing I remember to this day from their house is the dining room with this nice drop chandelier. I always said to myself, ‘If I ever make enough money, one day, I’m going to have my drop chandelier similar to the one at my grandparents’ house.'”
The chandelier hangs over a Ralph Lauren walnut dining room table with an Art Deco-style ebony inlay.
The chairs, refined but comfortable, are upholstered in a nailed and tufted pear-colored green silk/linen brocade, done by Katsch Upholstery in the Bronx.
“The chairs had to be versatile to shift between feeling dressy enough to entertain at the table and casual enough so the family could have their breakfast there every morning,” Williams said.
In the kitchen is a bar where Teplitzky’s sons Aiden, 13, and Sean, 10, can sit on stools and watch the flat-screen television.
The couple kept some of the finishes offered by the developer and swapped others out for their own, Teplitzky said.
For instance, a rather small refrigerator was replaced with a 42-inch Sub-Zero (Dobens also added a 138-bottle Sub-Zero wine cooler), and the light oak wood floors throughout the apartment were stained a deep red, hinting at mahogany.
“I always look at the resale value,” Teplitzky said. “I decided with the mentality that you can never know what might happen, that the improvements we were going to make would be improvements that another person would appreciate, like the crown moldings. We changed the floor stain because all of the apartments in this building have the light stain, so people would come here and think this apartment looks different, which adds to its value.”
The couple also layered otherwise plain walls in the kitchen with glass tile in green, yellow and cream, and added an iridescent Venetian plaster to the walls of the powder room, to complement the marble included by the developer.
Teplitzky said on May 19 the final piece of furniture arrived: a low settee of mahogany with gold detail from Agostino upholstered in tangerine orange silk and linen damask by Christopher Hyland.
“I wanted people to walk into this room and look out and say, ‘Wow, what a view,'” she said. “If we had put two chairs with high backs, your eye would go to the chairs. So we chose the settee instead.”
Opposite are two custom-made armchairs upholstered in corn yellow accompanied by two delicate brass tables with rosewood inlay shelves on the top and bottom from Henredon. Many of the items in the room have touches of brass, including an ornate rolling tea table that the couple found in New Orleans.
Teplitzky placed colorful art from Chile throughout the apartment, and chose an Egyptian blue sofa to complement a painting hanging above it. Two blue vases in the entrance gallery hint at the blue themes, which predominate in the private wing of the apartment. Teplitzky said she encouraged her sons to become involved in picking their own designs for their rooms.
“Most parents decide on behalf of their kids what they’re going to do,” she said. “We didn’t. We didn’t want to be in a situation where they say later, ‘I hate this.’ We wanted this to be their personality.”
Sean went for a colorful feel with a focus on soccer and music, while Aiden’s room has a cutting-edge synthetic desk, where he does his homework and works on the computer. Both have custom-made closets and flat-screen televisions.
In the master suite, two spaces were created: a sitting room and a bedroom. In addition to the bed, wool and silk handwoven carpets by Carini Lang and a smoky reverse-painted glass-panel-framed dressing mirror by Shehadi Mirrors are also focal points.
Teplitzky and Dobens each have a custom-made closet, hers a walk-in with track lighting. Because the couple wanted their apartment to smooth away any ruffles in their marriage — “we were sharing a closet before, and we were fighting,” laughed Teplitzky — they also built a home office.
“In our previous apartment, our office was within the master bedroom,” she said. “And Max and I have different cycles. Max is a morning person, and I am an evening person, so he’d go to bed at 11 p.m., and I’d be up with the light on until 2 a.m. We knew if we ever moved, we’d have a separate office.”
That space, next to the master bedroom, has an old-world feel with antiqued file cabinets and a desk by ABC Carpet & Home. The desk is situated in front of a large window in a spot that makes it easy to swivel around and see who’s coming in.
“That’s important, especially because when you’re working at home, sometimes the kids come in right in the middle of negotiations over a $20 million apartment,” laughed Teplitzky.