Wall Street is the new Soho… really.
“I have a theory,” says hotelier Andr Balazs, a 25-year resident of Soho whose Mercer Hotel was a milestone in the emergence of sophisto-chic hospitality in that once gritty quarter.
“There’s a shift in the center of gravity of commercial, business and social life in Manhattan,” he says. “The location of the advertising, fashion and film industries has come Downtown. I believe Houston Street is the new 57th Street and what’s happening in Soho culturally and from a residential point of view is just beginning further Downtown.
“If Soho is the young, hip Midtown, then Wall Street is the new Soho. I see the same kind of movement there that I saw in Soho 18 years ago,” says Balazs, who’s still involved with old Soho, most recently by designing an ultra-luxury condominium at 40 Mercer Street.
Balazs’ vision of Wall Street as Manhattan’s most promising (and potentially prosperous) new neighborhood led SDS Investments, headed by Tamir and Alex Sapir and S. Lawrence Davis, to invite Balazs to co-develop and brand the property at 15 William Street they bought last year for $90 million from the Manocherian family.
Opening for sales shortly, the project, the William Beaver House (so named because it’s at the intersection of William and Beaver streets), will be the first new construction ultra-luxury condominium in Lower Manhattan. It joins such recent high-profile projects as 15 Broad Street (Downtown by Philippe Starck), the Cipriani Club Residences at 55 Wall Street and the Armani/Casa-designed 20 Pine Street — all conversions.
“There’s clearly a momentum,” says Balazs, “a brotherhood amongst these buildings, which I think will add a lot to the neighborhood.”
William Beaver, designed by Tsao & McKown Architects, will rise 47 stories above mostly low-rise neighboring buildings on one corner of a five-pointed intersection just across the street from Delmonico’s and close to the newly reconstructed Hanover Park.
Looking like nothing else in the vicinity, it will be a sleekly modernist structure clad in contrasting bronze and gray-colored brick with bright yellow-glazed brick panels strewn playfully across the façde from top to bottom. The street-level base from which the tower sets back is adorned in ipe, a tough, reddish-brown wood.
No glass wall here, like with Balazs’s 40 Mercer, which hit the market last year.
“This context exposes you too much,” says Balazs. “It’s tough on narrow Wall Street, when someone lives 20 feet from you. We wanted to back off of an all-glass building and make it contextual, yet fun and somewhat distinguished at the same time.”
Designed for efficiency, the mostly one-bedroom and studio apartments are aimed at hard-working/hard-playing Wall Streeters. In addition to these locals, says Balazs, the Beaver will appeal to “younger, adventuresome people with a particularly sophisticated urban sense of style who like to be in that kind of neighborhood.”
The building will offer 319 condominiums altogether, including some spacious two-bedroom layouts, 48 custom-furnished units, 10 duplex “townhouses” with private terraces, and three penthouses with private terraces. Units have nine-and-a-half-foot ceilings, eight-foot windows, 18-foot living rooms, Burmese teak floors and washer/dryers.
“They’re meant to be affordable,” Balazs says, adding, “of course, that is a relative term.”
Prices are still being determined, but, when asked if they would reach above $1,200 a square foot, Balazs says, “I think they’ll be north of $1,200 a square foot.”
The idea is that consumers will be buying more than the square footage of their apartments. The draw is the Balazs-conceived, five-star hotel-type amenity package, which, the building’s promotional material exclaims, is “supercharged.”
Neighbors will certainly get a supercharged first impression: the see-through ceiling atop the entrance to the lobby will support a large, glass-encased, lighted outdoor Jacuzzi, from which steam will rise in the winter months.
The hot tub and outdoor shower are part of the second-floor indoor/outdoor amenity center, which includes a glass-lined 60-foot lap pool with lounge-deck and bar, outdoor basketball court with bleachers to encourage tournaments, a squash court, outdoor handball and tetherball courts, gym, sauna and steam rooms and, for those who want to improve their circus skills, gymnastic rings and a trapeze bar on the terrace.
The building has a covered Japanese-inspired outdoor dog-walking garden and a 30-person “disco-convertible” screening room with plush lavender chaise “cinema beds” that swing out of the way to transform the space into a dance lounge with wet bar. The Penthouse Sky Lounge contains a catering kitchen, private dining room and entertainment terrace overlooking New York Harbor and the East and Hudson rivers. There is a landscaped sundeck on the 47th floor.
“If you wish to have a dinner party for 10 people you can have it in the place you live,” says Balazs. “It might not be in your apartment, but you can start with cocktails there, then go to dinner up on the top of the building and later retire to watch a movie with 20 or 30 of your friends in a private theater.”
Balazs would seem to have had his most supercharged fun planning the Beaver’s lobby, which opens to the street and encompasses a driveway paved with the same marble used in the interior lobby. “A California idea,” he says. “You drive through the lobby into the parking lot,” a three-level garage beneath the building. Or, of course, leave it for the valet.
“It’s perfect if you’re heading out to the Hamptons,” he adds. “You call down and your car appears in the lobby.”
A collaborative effort with Giorgio Deluca, the lobby will be “somewhat like a very good hotel lobby,” says Balazs, “a place you can sit down and while away the hours — a big living room with service.”
There will also be a large oval sunken conversation pit with upholstered seating around fire jets; the lobby will be open to the public. “The closest analogy I can make is the Mercer Hotel lobby,” describes Balazs, “where you can walk in and order something. Imagine a little bit of Dean & DeLuca with a bar.”
Prepared foods will be available for take-out or delivered up to the apartments. With kitchens of limited use for many of the hard-living residents of the building, the designers figured, they may as well be invisible. Apartments contain stylish attach kitchens, with Corian countertops and sliding backsplashes that conceal the faucet and sliding butcher-block panels that hide the sink or cooktop.
Another innovative interior design feature is the “Murphy Office,” a work/computer space that can be closed off to put clutter out of sight in an instant when guests arrive.
The living rooms are open and loft-like. The bedroom suites borrow from those at the Mercer Hotel, the oversized bathrooms opening fully into the bedrooms. “If you’re alone, it gives you a greater sense of light and air,” says Balazs, “and if you’re with someone, it’s usually a lover or partner. It’s a playful thing.”
The entire project is a playful thing, according to Balazs, “to be taken with a wink and a smile.”
He recalls dreaming up the concept for the building. “I always liked the idea of a ‘house,’ like the ‘Astor House.’ It’s on Beaver Street, so I thought what a cute thing to call it Beaver House. And then everyone told me there’s too much innuendo in that, so we said let’s call it William Beaver.”
Expected to be completed in early 2008, the building is being marketed by the Sunshine Group. Balazs and company have begun putting up bright yellow billboards across the city featuring a cartoon beaver wearing a tuxedo and holding a martini glass, in anticipation of opening events in November, which will take place at the sales office at nearby 20 Exchange Street.
The office is housed in an historic bank which is being converted to a bar/cafeacute; designed to capture the spirit of the William Beaver, with teller windows offering refreshments. Open to the public, the sprawling space will contain a model apartment, a mock-up of the conversation pit, a Disneyesque animated video interaction between Balazs and the Beaver and a DJ in the evenings.
Both of his previous condominiums, One Kenmare Square and 40 Mercer, sold swiftly and easily, but, Balazs acknowledges, “this is a very different market and a much bigger project. It’s the best new product in what is perhaps the most exciting new neighborhood in New York. That is good. But it’s really going to depend on the pricing.”