In this week's New York, S. Jhoanna Robledo checks in with an old friend, the remixed Brownstone East Village, which you may remember as that bizarre 14th Street four-unit renovation with the retractable glass wall. Last time around, the comments were pretty much split on the design, but now we have some more information to work with. There's some price info to report (the unit with the parlor-floor glass curtain will go for $2.595 million for its 1,971 square feet), and here's the logistics:
From the street, the property will look much like its neighbors; at the flick of a switch, though, the parlor-floor façade will rise up, garage-door style, and tuck under the ceiling. A glass balustrade serves as a safety barrier, and an “air curtain”—essentially a heavy-duty, continuous fan—will blow downward to keep the bugs out and the temperature even, and mask the din from 14th Street.OK, the balustrade makes sense?you just have to make sure your dog doesn't have mad ups?but in all seriousness, what is the point of this? It's "bringing the outside to the inside" and all that nonsense, but it's an outside you can't touch (balustrade) or step out into (second floor), being held at bay by a "heavy-duty, continuous fan" that would seemingly just create a din that's even worse than the one seeping up from 14th Street. What is this other than a big window that doesn't even let in fresh air? How about some thoughts from the peanut gallery? Oh, and two of the other, more normal units are now listed through Corcoran.
· The Open House [NYMag]
· Development Du Jour: The Brownstone East Village [Curbed]
· The Brownstone East Village [thebrownstoneeastvillage.com]