Of home, love and poetry

In the middle of the Christmas rush, I took a journey to another world. My aunt invited me along to look at apartments with her. She is planning to downsize from her townhouse on Stuyvesant Square in Manhattan, to a three-bedroom apartment in a full-service building. A full-service building is a sugar-plum dream to someone who has lived in lofts and bungalows most of her adult life—me.

Our first stop was a surprise. We met her broker in a relic of a Third Avenue apartment house near Gramercy Park. Could this be what they meant by luxury high-rise? It was not. The developer was renting space in the building to present the new apartment building designed by Phillippe Starck, the French designer of everything from watches to restaurants.

We never got to walk inside Starck’s new glass tower on 23rd Street, but in a highly choreographed hour-long presentation in a Starckified environment, complete with white leather pouf seating, we heard the master himself say (on film, of course) that this building was not about him. Although his disembodied head punctuates every page of his glossy literature, Starck claims that his glass box is about “love... a fire…” even, Phillippe says with his self-endowed authority, “about poetry.”

Later, we taxied down to Fi-Di, what the cognoscenti call the Financial District these days. Like SoHo and TriBeCa, every neighborhood needs an acronym to be fashionable now. FiDi, our young realtor tells us, is “super secure” because of its Wall Street locale. “That’s one way to look at it,” I say skeptically. It’s secure because it’s the new number one terror threat in the United States.

The apartments he shows us at 25 Broad Street, a stone’s throw from the statue of George Washington that commemorates his inaugural address on this spot, are barricaded behind a solid marble facade that looks capable of surviving the storming of the Bastille. Some of the amenities of this old-world building will include a children’s playroom, private screening room, gym and billiards room.

And, if anyone ever does storm the steps of the old JP Morgan investment firm building/condo, the residents will be able to survive for days on the cold-storage locker supplies. That is, if any of the tenants know how to cook. Although the kitchens are outfitted with first-rate appliances, from Sub-Zero refrigerators to Viking ranges, the counter space is just big enough to slice a few limes for a Margarita, not for a dinner that requires any serious preparation.

In the new world of apartment living, it’s all about the finishes. Bulthaup kitchens, Toto toilets, fumed oak flooring, limestone walls.

There are common rooms to encourage a dormitory-style conviviality among neighbors. Communal roof-gardens have private cabanas for more intimate gatherings. This is hotel-style living, at home. At $1,000 per square foot and up, it makes sense to expect concierge service.

My aunt seems out of place here. Although her desire for opulence rivals that of JP Morgan himself, she is the family madron now. The doyenne of Christmas dinners and Easter feasts, she insists on hands-on supervision of each course of our multi-course meals. And “cooking,” she says with authority, “is messy!” The open-plan kitchens of these new apartments in the Valley of the Wall Streeters are on display to the living room, not hidden away to disguise the real work that goes on to prepare a meal.

We traipsed through a dozen spaces that day, enjoying the views of Manhattan from on high, north, south, east and west. Slices of river here, the Empire State Building there. We oohed at the marble and ahhed at the terraces. But at the end of the day I was happy to be back in my sprawling funky hand-made loft in a building built before the turn of the 20th century. Home never looked so good. Yes, Phillippe, it is about love, but it doesn’t have to cost $3 million to be poetry.

- Cass Collins