By Steve Cutler
If the swift pace of pre-construction sales for Trump Soho, which opened last September listing apartments for $3,000 a square foot, didn’t signal plainly enough where Soho prices were headed, 350 West Broadway, which opened for pre-sales in May, will no doubt tell the real estate world that the bar is continuing to rise.
With apartments at the boutique condominium starting at nearly $10 million each, the term “upscale” hardly begins to describe its potential buyer, nor the value of new development property in Soho.
“All of our [prospective] buyers have homes in other parts of the world,” said Mary Ellen Cashman of Stribling Marketing Associates, which is handling sales for the condo. “The whole nature of Soho has changed. It’s now an international address.”
Perhaps Aby Rosen, the developer of 350 West Broadway, figured with sales slowing for the mundane, merely upscale condominiums in the city, his best bet was to aim at the staggeringly rich buyer. But then, he said, “I have always counted on the high end of the market as the best bet.”
Rosen has previously built such ultra-luxury, celebrity-architect-driven condominiums as 50 Gramercy Park North and 40 Bond Street, both with Ian Schrager.
The super-luxury market, noted Rosen, “is still strong and will always be strong. There’s only eight apartments in this building, and there will always be eight people who will understand the quality that we are providing.” And, presumably, have the bucks to buy it.
Actually, the marketing team might not even need eight buyers; one of the serious contenders for the top floors wants to combine units. “We’re working on a floor plan to combine the top two units,” said Cashman. The intent is to create a 6,000-square-foot palace for $23 million.
Rosen’s relationship with the site for 350 West Broadway follows the evolution of Soho. “I tried to buy that site 15 years ago when it traded for $1 million dollars out of bankruptcy,” he recalled. “I couldn’t get it at that time, and it lay idle for 15 years — it was very sad.”
A diamond dealer bought it out from under Rosen, “then someone else bought it from him, and then I bought it from that person — a great developer,” he added. “He had gotten a set of plans approved, and I went back to the Soho Alliance and a whole bunch of agencies to get the changes I wanted implemented there.”
What did it cost this time around? “Who knows?” said Rosen. “A lot of money; I think $25 million. I tried to buy the neighbor and the site in the back to do a hotel there with Schrager, but I couldn’t get all the pieces of the puzzle together, so I went back to the original scheme.”
The concept capitalizes on the rare frontage on West Broadway. Plans call for 10,000 square feet of retail on two floors at the bottom, and eight full-floor residential units above that.
Rosen says it will be a micro-scale version of the landmark Lever House at 390 Park Avenue, which he acquired in 1998. “It’s the same sort of tower elegantly sitting on the base, with gardens and a green surrounding.”
Rosen brought in architect Dan Shannon of Moed de Armas & Shannon as soon as he bought the site in 2006. “What was unique,” recalled Shannon, “is you have this very articulated two-story storefront retail with metal and lots of glass, but lots of detail in the mullions and a retractable canopy that really says retail. But then the entry [to the residences] is very different. All of a sudden, it’s a very private place.”
The entrance to the apartments is finished with textured rust-colored granite panels similar to the stone that interrupts the glass on the façade.
For the interiors, Rosen called in William Georgis, an “Architectural Digest Top 100” architect who had designed several of Rosen’s personal residences, the public spaces at the Lever House and is now working with him on a hotel in Palm Beach. The building is Georgis’s first condominium.
The apartment layouts, from nearly 3,000 to 3,500 square feet each, will be Park Avenue meets the Soho loft, a concept close to the designer’s heart. “To me, the challenge has always been to reconcile an open-plan-type lifestyle with a more hierarchal, formal, prewar plan concept,” said Georgis.
The project at 350 West Broadway, he said, “is almost a Park Avenue plan, where there is a gracious entrance foyer with a family bedroom wing separate from public spaces. But at the public space level there is a living/dining area that opens graciously to the kitchen.”
As with a typical Park Avenue apartment, each unit will have a separate entrance for the hired staff. And the living/dining area is designed, Georgis said, “in such a way that if there is staff or somebody working in the kitchen, they are out of sight lines.”
Likewise, the living areas are screened from public view by the stone sheaths that accent the enormous glass panels on the building’s façade. They come up 36 inches on the interior window wall, “so you have the use of the wall for your layout,” said Shannon. “People will feel protected, and they can put furniture against it.”
Each of the two- and three-bedroom apartments will have walnut-stained white oak hardwood floors and a full laundry room. The kitchens and breakfast rooms will include granite countertops, black walnut and stainless-steel cabinets, Gaggenau cooktops and ovens, and Sub-Zero wine coolers and refrigerators. The master baths will have statuary marble and heated flooring, steam showers and Dornbracht fixtures — plus a glowing opaque glass wall.
“Because we have a small footprint,” said Shannon, “we couldn’t put all the bathrooms into the core. So we’ve got a bathroom on the perimeter of the building. We were able to use a big piece of glass [the same glass as on the facade] but we opacify it, and it becomes this lantern in the bathroom.”
From the outside one will see a translucent glass strip running up through the building. But from the bathtub, said Shannon, “you’ll see this glowing white glass panel. You can just make out the skyline outside, but nobody on the street can enjoy what you’re doing inside.”
Most residences will have private outdoor space, including a 2,700-square-foot landscaped setback terrace on the third floor and a 1,388-square-foot rooftop terrace serving the penthouse.
Georgis designed the lobby to showcase works by three artists, including American artist George Condo’s first installation in a condominium.
The large, raucous, colorful Condo painting would seem to belie the clean, classic approach taken with the rest of the building, but makes sense in a project by Aby Rosen, a famous collector of contemporary art. One part of his massive collection is on display in the Lever House lobby, and another is on loan to the sales office for the condominium.
The lobby will also be finished with fumed oak floors, Vermont Cold Spring Black Granite and lacquered panels on the walls, and feature an eclectic mix of custom and antique furniture with elaborate bronze door pulls by Michele Oka Doner, a Soho artist. “Seabed,” a large-scale ceramic installation by Peter Lane, will hang adjacent to the Condo painting.
With the foundation having been laid, the building is just coming out of the ground and is scheduled for completion in summer 2009.
While it opened sales last May with a lavish party, Stribling is planning a low-key marketing campaign, with small salons and private dinners prepared by high-profile chefs, befitting the style to which the prospective buyers are accustomed. That clientele, the kind that keeps pieds-à-terre with three- and four-bedrooms in several cities around the world, helps keep New York City afloat.
“God bless those people,” said Rosen. “Right now we need them more than ever.”