As the president of DG Neary Realty, Gil Neary could have gone for a trophy apartment as an obvious symbol of his professional success.
Instead, he turned his home of 24 years, an Art Deco-era apartment in Chelsea Gardens at 255 West 23rd Street, into a distinguished but comfortable throwback to the 1930s decorated with an eclectic collection of period pieces.
The aesthetic makes sense for Neary, who shares the 1,300-square-foot apartment with his long-time partner, Scott Riedel, and owns the boutique residential real estate firm that bears his name and has a lock on much of the Chelsea market.
Neary got his feet wet in real estate as a broker at Bellmarc in 1979 and worked at the Rockrose Development Corp. between 1986 and 1987. When the market crashed in 1987 and he lost his job, he opened his firm out of his apartment with six employees. “I thought, now I’ll do it myself,” he told The Real Deal a few years ago.
DG Neary — which he runs with business partner Dan Gerstein — subsequently found a home at 57 West 16th Street, and carved out a niche by catering to gay clients. The firm currently has about 25 brokers and, in addition to Chelsea, targets all of Downtown Manhattan.
Neary has done some of that business without leaving his building. He said, for example, that he has sold 98 percent of the 160 apartments in Chelsea Gardens over the past 20 years.
“I find when I’m selling apartments here, there are people who come and either that little light bulb goes off, and they get it — or not,” said Neary, an energetic, gregarious 51-year-old who sits on the co-op board and has been actively involved in the restoration of his building, particularly its Art Deco lobbies.
“Some people say, ‘Ewww, there are fire escapes’, or ‘the bricks are dirty,'” he continued. “Other people come in and say, ‘Oh, wow, this is magical.'”
What is magical for Neary about Chelsea Gardens, built in 1939, is its four buildings that surround a leafy, serene garden. It has two entrances, one on 23rd Street and one on 24th Street, each with a lobby. Neary first discovered Chelsea Gardens when his best friend — and now upstairs neighbor — Lia Troy, a broker with Halstead Property, bought an apartment there.
“I called him up and said, ‘You really should look at this building,'” Troy said. “He had once told me that his concept was to live in a building where there was a big garden, and you could have all your friends live in the building, too.”
Neary quickly fell in love with Chelsea Gardens.
His first apartment had two bedrooms and one bathroom. After a decade there, an elderly neighbor he had befriended, the original owner of her two-bedroom, two-bath apartment, died. He purchased her apartment.
“She was about 89 years old — very lovely,” he said. “In every room, there’s a little something that belonged to her: a couple of dishes in the kitchen, a couple of knickknacks in the living room. So her spirit is happy here.”
This piecemeal approach to decorating his apartment, which has an off-the-foyer floor plan, suited Neary’s goal of recreating a 1939 Deco-style apartment. While he shops at auctions and estate sales, he has also found some of his furniture on the street or at flea markets.
“I call it scavenge and arrange,” he joked. “If you bought an apartment in 1939, you wouldn’t have all your furniture from 1939, because people didn’t go out and buy all their furniture in one day,” Neary explained. “You would have some furniture that was older, that you got from your family. So my furniture is kind of eclectic, but it’s not atypical of what you would have seen in an apartment like this.”
Thus, the dining room, with its hand-printed “El Morocco”-style wallpaper with giant banana leaves, has a French 1890s-era armoire, which he uses as a china cabinet.
His second bedroom, which serves as a guest bedroom, office and television room, has a massive wooden Gothic cabinet reminiscent of a Catholic altar or the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. And the master bedroom has very little that is Deco at all.
But in most of the apartment, the overarching theme is Deco: for instance, the rugs throughout the apartment. Neary has an additional set of Deco rugs, so he can switch them out from time to time, along with curtains and furniture slipcovers.
He also has three small black tables, along with a dining room table not on display, which were once owned by Jimmy Jemail, the original Inquiring Photographer from the Daily News (the photographer went around and took snapshots of people in the city and provided their answers to a range of man-on-the-street questions). Jemail built and furnished a summer house on Long Island in 1939, which was down the block from a home owned by Neary’s mother. She ended up selling the Inquiring Photographer’s summer house. (Neary’s mother, 81, is also a real estate agent.)
Neary made relatively few structural changes to his second-floor apartment. First, he widened a doorway between the foyer and the dining area to create a floor-through effect, taking advantage of light from windows in the living room and kitchen, as well as the air flow.
“I always call this the ‘concierge apartment,’ because you can see people coming in and out on 24th Street, as well as in the garden [off of 23rd Street],” he said. “As a real estate broker, I can keep an eye on my constituency.”
Neary also recreated what is now a mustard-colored kitchen.
“The kitchen had linoleum on the floor, and was like a dinette,” he said. “I upgraded the kitchen, because it was a kitchen from 1939, but I tried to make it like a new version of a 1939 kitchen.”
From his extensive experience showing properties, Neary saw his share of grand Upper West Side apartments, and he strove for a kitchen reminiscent of a butler’s pantry. He had at one time assisted an aunt who owned a cabinetmaking business, and he decided to install cherry cabinets with glass doors to make the narrow kitchen look larger. He retained the molding on top of the cabinets.
He put in two side-by-side, waist-high refrigerators to increase counter space, and added mirrored backsplashes and granite countertops.
“From my designing days, I used a lot of visual tricks,” said Neary, who went to college initially for architecture, graduated with a degree in psychology and later took some design courses. (He eventually also received an MBA degree from Baruch College.)
“With the glass in the cabinets, your eye goes to the back of the cabinet instead of the wood.”
Neary left the foyer and living room alone, and, aside from putting in a pedestal sink, he left the guest bathroom as it was, and painted the hallways maroon. In the pale yellow master bathroom, the only room not directly connected to the foyer, he put in a stained glass window.
“I sold an apartment in the building that faced a wall to a fellow, and he said, ‘That doesn’t matter, because I’m a glass artist,'” Neary explained. “‘I’m going to make a beautiful window here, and you won’t notice the wall.’ He made me one too. Most of it is privacy glass, but these little triangles are peek-a-boos so I can see the garden.”
Very little in the lavender master bedroom follows the Deco theme, except the rugs, curtains and a big, round light fixture above the bed that Neary calls “the moon.”
In the second bedroom across the hall, Neary returned to Deco, using lamps from his grandmothers, and two light fixtures with globes straight out of the Sears catalog from 1939. Neary found one of the fixtures in the apartment of someone he was helping to move.
“They were going to throw it out, so I took it, and went to a store in the Village and found the globes,” he said. At the time, he noticed the fixture was priced at $150.
But the one light was a bit undersized for the room, so 15 years later, Neary decided to purchase another at the same Village store. He figured with inflation, the fixture would cost at most $600, and was stunned when he got a bill for $1,500.
“Then I thought, maybe this wasn’t the best choice,” he said, chuckling. “For $1,500, I could have gotten something really wonderful. But I’d already done it. And the room is a little off balance, and I thought it was a fun way to balance the room.”
Neary’s selective approach to furnishings is mirrored in his art, which is found throughout the apartment. An original Keith Haring painting hangs in the second bedroom with an elaborately carved wooden tramp-art frame most likely worth more than the painting itself, along with paintings of street scenes from the Sacré-Coeur Basilica in Paris.
In the foyer, Neary put his collection of faces, from a painting by Andy Warhol to a photograph of Bette Midler to a Chevalier lithograph with a woman’s face signed by the artist.
“When you come into the foyer, it’s a reception area, so I wanted people to feel like they were being received by a bunch of people,” Neary said. “Sort of like the party, in my head.”
That party’s still calm enough not to require more space. Neary owns the apartment next door and could create a three-bedroom, three-bathroom apartment, but he currently has a tenant there. He said he is comfortable in the apartment.
And he’s taken the money he’s saved to purchase three homes on Fire Island and one in Columbus, Ohio. At the same time, he’s helped several bachelor friends sell their trophy apartments and move into something smaller. “It’s nice to go into a place and go ‘wow,’ but at the end of ‘wow’ is the maintenance,” he said.