What is it that sold seven apartments at Ian Schrager’s 40 Bond for nearly $3,000 a square foot (including a $3.5 million one-bedroom), while its “marketing” consisted of little more than rumors on real estate blogs?
The Noho location, while promising, is far from established. But, hey, says Schrager, “I’ve never really had a good location. When I went to Miami Beach with the Delano Hotel, it was like Beirut.”
The expectation the Schrager brand brought to clubs like Studio 54 and the Palladium three decades ago was flamboyant nightlife “taken up a notch” — a favorite phrase of his. His hotels, like the Royalton, Paramount, and Hudson in New York, the Delano in Miami Beach, and the Mondrian in West Hollywood, are ultracool, high-style destinations. “I like to think that if people see it’s a project I’m doing it sets up a certain level of expectation,” he says.
His first forays into condominiums, which include the recent, successful 50 Gramercy Park North and now 40 Bond, with its load-bearing glass walls and graffiti-inspired design, promise an ultraluxurious lifestyle.
“The idea,” says Schrager, “is taking what rich people who have houses at the beach with estate managers taking care of everything to the urban environment and really making living in the city easy.
“Serviced apartments have been dominant in Asia and Europe for a long time,” he adds, “and we know the kind of service the Carlyle and Pierre have been offering for so many years. It’s taking that idea up a notch. It’s as if you had a complete household staff, cook, chef, nanny — we’ll just do everything for you. Because I’m in the hotel business and I’m not a real estate guy, this level of service doesn’t intimidate me.”
The site for 40 Bond was originally meant to be a hotel, until Schrager and partner Aby Rosen decided that “after September 11 and with the cost of construction, doing a hotel wouldn’t be the best use of the property.” They bought out their other partners in the hotel venture for $16 million, and, says Schrager, “we decided to do condominiums with townhouses.”
The 11-story building will contain 22 apartments and five townhouses with private front entrances and rear gardens, plus a triplex penthouse.
“We tried to get it rezoned to build a bigger building,” recalls Schrager, “and we thought we were going to get it. But the people on the planning commission changed, and, when there’s a change like that, people are reluctant to grant variances. We thought it would be a virtue to not hold it up and just go forward as of right.”
In the end, its relatively modest size could help ensure its success. “The business model,” says Schrager, “is to build very unique and distinct places with a specific point of view, to have less apartments with a higher markup per foot in each apartment. When I’m looking to sell 28 unique, specialized apartments, it really is a bit insulated from the way the housing market and the economy goes and less vulnerable to interest rate swings.”
Schrager first collaborated with Pritzker Prize-winning architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron on plans for a proposed hotel on Lafayette Street and Fourth Avenue, a site that instead went to Related Companies, which built the Gwathmey-designed Astor Place condominium.
Best known for the Tate Modern in London and the de Young museum in San Francisco, the team had never done a residential building in the United States. “I just saw the Prada Building in Tokyo,” recalls Schrager, “and felt with them I would really be able to do something novel. I’ve never worked with anybody like them, so smart and willing to try everything. They don’t have a specific style that they keep refining.”
Of the exterior, Schrager says, “we love glass, but didn’t want to do a curtain wall because we wanted to have all the windows operable. The glass walls are load bearing and are sitting on each individual floor slab. It’s just a different way of building.” The green-hued cast glass panels on the façde are made in Barcelona.
The building enters via a striking 22-foot high, 140-foot long cast aluminum gate with elaborate graffiti-inspired lacing, a motif that is continued on the white Corian walls in the lobby.
“The graffiti was Herzog’s idea,” says Schrager. “I look at it as Gaudiesque. Jacques thinks of it more as Pop Art, with Dubuffet and Pollock the inspiration for that. We thought the graffiti-inspired gate, which can only be done because of the computer, had the same kind of edginess and exuberance the neighborhood has.”
Computers were no help in getting much of the other detail work done. “Jacques wanted wooden window frames and we couldn’t get anybody in America to make them,” Schrager says. “They were so independent and busy they don’t care about trying to do something different. We ran into that with just about everything we did there.”
The smoked oakwood plank floors, close to the kind used in classic prewar buildings like the Dakota, are imported from Austria and the Corian bathroom walls will be installed by craftsmen from Germany. “We’re not good at that yet,” says Schrager.
The 22 apartments, ranging from a one-bedroom of about 1,300 square feet to the 3,300-square-foot four-bedroom, have 11-foot and higher ceilings, floor-to-ceiling operable glass windows, and wide-plank wood floors in all rooms, including kitchens and bathrooms. The project is expected to be completed in spring 2007.
With 40 Bond about to open its sales office, Schrager sees his as a building outside the designer architect trend. “You see the indiscriminate branding of buildings with glamour-boy architects and I think that’ll pass,” he says. “It’s really, in the end, all about what you build, how strong the product is, not whose name is involved. I wouldn’t even use Herzog and de Meuron’s name, it’s not a big deal for me. It’s the product that’s supposed to do the work.”
Independent broker Fionn Campbell, a veteran of the fashion industry, agrees that the rare top-quality product, especially the boutique selling a limited number of units at top-of-the-line prices, has a market edge.
“They can make their bottom line by creating fewer units at higher prices,” he says. “Why bother with an inexpensive unit when they can provide an exclusive product for a select few? Like Gucci, or any of the Fifth or Madison Avenue boutiques, which have only a select number of garments in the store.”
Anyone wondering how a Schrager-labeled big box residential development would look will want to keep close watch on One Madison Avenue. Schrager and partner Rosen are near signing a contract to acquire the building, which was bought last March by SL Green Realty for $918 million, with plans for an ultraluxury condominium.