From the avenue, the pink-brick developing in New York’s Gramercy Park that has served as architect David Ling’s property and work space for the earlier two a long time seems reasonably unremarkable. On the other aspect of its alternatively regular façade, even so, matters speedily choose a change for the surreal.
Erected in the mid-1800s, the constructing has cycled by means of a number of identities around its life span. According to the historical blog site Daytonian in Manhattan, it is been a secure for horses, a grocery retailer, a boarding property, an car maintenance shop, and a dental laboratory/assembly factory. And now, the 3-story framework awaits its upcoming incarnation, as Ling has lofted it onto the industry with an inquiring price just a smidgen down below $8 million.
The architect, who did stints in the companies of Richard Meier and I.M. Pei before launching his individual exercise in the ’90s, procured the Gramercy Park developing in 2000 for $740,000, general public records display. After gutting the 6,500-square-foot structure’s interior, Ling reworked it into a stay-get the job done space, that, as he advised Dwell magazine in 2008, served as one thing of a laboratory where he could experiment with style thoughts outside the house of his normal follow. The unconventional benefits garnered much publicity — in addition to Dwell, Ling’s loft has been featured in the New York Situations, Remodelista, Architizer, and in Netflix’s 2018 sequence “Remarkable Interiors.”
The most notice-grabbing of Ling’s style and design experiments include water. In his “Amazing Interiors” section, the architect says, “I like flowing open spaces — no doors, no walls.” So, relatively than employing the aforementioned reliable objects to develop separation between the building’s many spaces, Ling constructed an interior moat with stepping stone pathway on its floor floor, a bridge on the middle level, and a waterfall that cascades from the mezzanine loft bedroom.
Other singular architectural elements involve a thick cone of curving steel, an homage to Richard Serra, that wraps all-around to build a shower wall at its widest finish, in the mezzanine bedroom, then descends to a sculptural level just one flooring underneath, next to a masonry wall painted Yves Klein blue.
Complementing the steel cone, the mezzanine bathroom also contains a conical metal sink and a brushed-steel commode, which Ling describes in “Amazing Interiors” as “a truly beautiful toilet, no matter of its background of getting a jail rest room.” (The building’s a few other bathrooms surface to be fully enclosed and outfitted with normal porcelain fixtures.)
For each on-line advertising supplies, the building’s next and third flooring are accessible even though a committed avenue entrance, every single with a doing the job hearth, roof-leading deck, kitchen and tub, facilitating their currently being leased out as person dwell/operate units. Oh, and for everyone asking yourself about the security of the mezzanine bedroom’s cantilevered mattress, in the Netflix series, Ling notes that only a pillow, a lamp and a cat have fallen from its ledge, and fortunately, all a few survived.
Found across the road from the Gramercy Park law enforcement station, and one particular block southeast of the neighborhood’s eponymous park, the property is listed with Stefania Cardinali of Corcoran.
