When the doors to Robert A.M. Stern’s 15 Central Park West opened in 2008, the building seemed like an anomaly.
With its limestone façade and architectural details, it was more reminiscent of a prewar co-op than a new Manhattan condo with the sleek, glassy look.
Mr. Stern, it turns out, was onto something. And these days, developers, architects and, most importantly, homebuyers are catching on to the “new old condo” concept — postwar construction made to look and feel like prewar inside and out, with high ceilings, thick walls, and generous layouts.
“They're alternatives to the ‘super talls,’ the 90-story glass towers,” says Jonathan Miller, president and CEO of Miller Samuel, a New York-based real estate appraisal and consulting firm. More:Brooklyn’s ‘Chiclet Mansion’ Gets a RedoDeparture from the “vanilla building”
Take the Fitzroy, a 10-story tower under construction near New York City’s High Line park in Chelsea. JDS Development Group and Property Markets Group had restored two nearby buildings from the late 1920s — Walker Tower and Stella Tower. The developers fell in love with the beauty and sturdiness of the materials and craftsman ship in those buildings.
When it came time for a brand new construction project, “they wanted to do something different from the ground-up, vanilla building with floor-to-ceiling windows,” says Vickey Barron, associate broker at Douglas Elliman and director of sales at The Fitzroy. “They committed to building something ground up that looks like it’s been there for 100 years.”
JDS and Largo Investments tapped designers Roman & Williams to create a building that could easily have been a sibling to Walker and Stella. The façade is of green terra cotta, manufactured by a 117-year-old family business in Europe. The windows are copper-clad. The building has that classic tripartite arrangement, with the base, the shaft, and the detailed Deco capitol, rather than the unrelenting glass curtain. Their tagline? “Bring beauty back.”
“People are shocked when I tell them that it’s new construction,” Barron says.
But they’re not shocked by the price. There are 14 units in the building, ranging from $5.2 million to $18.75 million, and Ms. Barron says that’s a competitive price with properties of similar size, age and amenities — but those properties tend to be of the “fishbowl” variety, not the prewar quality and design in a new building.
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Masonry instead of glass
The Fitzroy has a number of competitors in the “new old condo” market.
There’s 10 Sullivan, a 16-story building made to look like a rehabbed International Style factory, but which offers 11-foot ceilings, Viking and Sub-Zero appliances and rooftop terraces. The Chamberlain, at 268 West 87th St., looks positively prewar.
And sandwiched between two prewar buildings, 1110 Park Avenue, a project of Toll Brothers City Living and designed by VOA and Barry Rice Architects, was conceived to complement the surrounding architecture. It, too, has the tripartite limestone façade, and interiors with 10-foot-high coffered ceilings.
A building that draws “from the storied architecture of the Upper East Side,” the 14-story 155 East 79th Street has a classic limestone base, with brick on the upper façade. Manhattan-based developers Anbau wanted a building that complemented its neighbors, but they also wanted to appeal to those dissatisfied by glass-box living.
“We made a conscious decision to use a lot of masonry because people don’t really want to live in office buildings,” says Stephen Glascock, president and founder of Anbau. “We’ve found that a lot of people are turning away from the all-glass building. We think it’s actually a big selling point.”
Indeed, since going on the market last year, eight of the 10 units have sold. The two that are left are a $9.55 million four-bedroom and a $14.1 million five-bedroom.
Merging the old with the amenities of new
Such buildings offer the aesthetic appeal of prewar construction with the perks of new construction.
“They have the above-average ceiling height, bigger windows, better soundproofing, fireplaces and hardwood floors of prewar buildings,” Mr. Miller says. “But they also have postwar amenities.”
Thus, you’ll likely find stroller parking, radiant heat flooring, swimming pools, screening rooms, wine cellars and terraces amidst the retro architecture.
The interiors tend to hew pre-war, too. Some of them even have enclosed kitchens, though they’re bigger than galley kitchens. There is more marble than stainless steel, more Venetian plaster than glass.
Though Ms. Barron wouldn’t say how much more it costs to build this way, she did say that JDS saw record sales at Walker and Stella Towers.
“People came out of the woodwork and were willing to pay top dollar to get something that didn’t look like everything else down the street,” she says.