Location: 16 West 21st Street btwn Fifth/Sixth Avenues
Size: 14 stories divided into 9 units (1 garden "townhouse," 5 full-floors, 2 duplexes and a triplex penthouse
Prices: Mid-$2 millions to mid-$3 millions; penthouse TBD
Architect: Morris Adjmi
Developer: Gruppo C'E
Sales & Marketing: Hagay Azoulay at Elliman
Lowdown: One of the most anticipated new building launches this spring is the sliver of glass—yep, the design blends perfectly with its Ladies Mile Historic District neighbors, except that the facade is entirely glass—at 16 West 21st Street. In many ways the building is a throwback to happier times for the real estate industry.
The building's full website has launched, featuring details (part-time doorman, 9' ceilings, ultra-fancy finishes), floorplans, moody rain drops paired with moodier instrumental indie rock from Explosions In The Sky (Friday Night Lights fans will probably instinctively brace for a drunk Riggins to come out of nowhere and blindside them) and, here's where things get really strange, videos and pictures of Barbie-like dolls having a grand old time in the "model apartment." The developers "thought they would go after sort of a creative-class audience, the people who are artists or art buyers with money," the campaign's creator told the NYT's Media Decoder blog, and that apparently means stop-motion sauciness. Not that we're talking cheap thrills:
If the video is frothy, the work behind it was serious. Imagination and Gruppo C’e, the developer, commissioned a miniature set. "The whole thing is to scale," Mr. Rogers said, "and in great, great detail." Robert Pyzocha, set designer, created apartment floors of hardwood-stripped maple, laser cut to match what the building’s floors will look like. The dolls’ clothes and the furniture were all handmade, and "floor plans, ceiling heights and window heights are pretty much exactly to scale, Mr. Rogers said.
The ads will begin running in New York City taxicabs this week, but only within a 10-block radius of the building. "They did an analysis of this more creative-class crew, and determined that the majority of buyers would be coming from within the neighborhood," Mr. Rogers said.
Well, if there's one thing that Mr. Rogers knows, it's his neighborhood. No listings online yet, so we'll have to wait a bit to see if those asking price predictions come true.
