Here in New York City, in the seven years since the first two Richard Meier buildings began taking shape on the West Side Highway, the glass curtain wall has become a defining element of this decade’s streetscape, just as red brick and limestone defined that of the 1920s.
With so many glass towers up and running not only here but also in Chicago and Miami, there are already decorating lessons to be gleaned, stories to be teased out of the interior landscapes of these see-through spaces. Have the inhabitants hewed to a modernist or a Miami-style playbook? Are they all really, really tidy?
It is hard not to imagine that many (perhaps sleekly dressed to match their interiors, brandishing Windex and a cigarette) are living in apartments as smooth and shiny as the computer renderings that developers used to sell the units — with maybe one Mies chair placed just so, to inhale the view — a tribe of Sims in their new Sim city. Or maybe not.
“I think you can do whatever you want in these spaces,” said Miles Redd, the very maximalist young designer, who has just finished decorating an apartment in a “glam, Halston ’70s way” at the Urban Glass House, the Philip Johnson/Annabelle Selldorf collaboration overlooking a UPS parking lot and the Hudson River.
Here are some highlights: smoky black glass dining room walls; a faux horn-painted Parsons table; a lamp with a base that looks like a gold machine gun; a swanky freestanding bar upholstered in teal velvet (the only object pushed up near the glass walls).
Finding the ground
The apartment belongs to a young photo producer who asked that her name not be used to protect her privacy. She was home working one recent morning in that dining room, dressed demurely in a white T-shirt and black jeans, with all the shades drawn so she could see her computer screen; her apartment wore a more noir, early Scarface mien.
“Remember, there have been glass moments in every decade,” Redd said. “I know people living at U.N. Plaza in an Edwardian fantasy. It’s the opposite of glass. If you turned your back on the windows you could be at Chatsworth.”
Other designers, noting the potential psychological impact of glass walls, take a behavioral approach. “You’ve got to ground yourself down in these spaces,” said Clodagh, the Irish designer, whose brand of lush minimalism and feng shui woo-wooism can be found in high-end spas and hotels. Right now she is working on one of the glass penthouse/townhouses on top of 40 Mercer, the grim-looking Jean Nouvel-designed building in SoHo, wrapping it in wool, stone, gunmetal and wood for a 35-year-old single businessman.
“If everything inside the glass was light, it would be like you were floating away,” she said. “You have to go for darker colors, for mid-tone woods, for more sculptural pieces, particularly if it’s a high floor. So here we’re doing a massive wood-slab dining room table, a massive stone slab for a buffet, a massive bespoke painting for the interior wall,” she added, meaning she’s commissioning art work, along with tables with scorch marks and others that have been sandblasted. “We like to interfere with our surfaces.”
At 40 Mercer (or M40, as its marketers branded it during construction), as at many name-architect-designed buildings, the window treatments are already in place: motorized scrim and blackout shades. Building rules include a proscription against putting window treatments outside those scrims, so that from the street the windows all read the same way.
“No bedsheets. Which I was thrilled about,” said Clodagh, who remembered a stay years ago at a glass house in Ireland. “There were no shades, and I wandered around in sarongs. So glass, too, is a moment for a collection of sarongs, to cover your dangly bits.” Glass dwellers do like to start fresh, and with prices running upward of $2,000 a square foot at many glass towers, those who buy into them seem to be able to afford to fully outfit them.
‘Living inside out’
Michael Holtz gave all his furniture away in 2002 before moving from his Upper West Side apartment into a one-bedroom in the first Meier tower on Perry Street. The “Crate and Barrel-type stuff” and the green suede Maurice Villency couch he had didn’t match “the glass house,” he said, which he turned over to a designer. Chris Kraig, who had worked at ABC Carpet & Home, made him a tastefully blond bachelor pad with lots of Hans Wegner furniture and the requisite white shag rug.
Holtz, 42, is the principal of a luxury travel company called The Smart Flyer. And he has become a promiscuous glass buyer: He now owns two more Meier apartments on Charles Street. A one-bedroom and a studio that he thought he’d combine, until he discovered an apartment larger than his own at Perry Street might be available.
Now, all of Holtz’s apartments are on the market as he contemplates buying his fourth here. Which apartment does he imagine he’ll end up in? “I have no idea,” he said.
Meanwhile, it took 2 1/2 weeks (and $35,000) for Jessica Shaw to design the interiors of the one-bedroom on Charles Street — with a green Design Within Reach couch, a tree stump-slice coffee table, a banana tree the size of a baby elephant and a pod family of Noguchi-style paper shades. Shaw used lots of circles, she explained, to play off the grid of the windows. “Also we wanted it to sort of have that terrarium feel, because that’s what it’s like living here.”
Holtz added, “It’s like living on the inside out. Your furniture has to look good in the round. You can’t leave your sheets in a ball.”
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On a high floor at the amoeba-shaped Astor Place Tower, Randy Ridless and his colleague, Beth Martell, used gigantic floor lamps and a chandelier to break up the landscape of the living room and give the view — all 180 degrees of it — a frame.
“The real challenge is that there’s no place to put the art, and anyway the art is that view,” said Ridless, who designed the Burberry flagship store in London and is working on a new Frette store here.
At Astor Place, he’s deployed furniture like sculptures — the glass building’s most direct cousin is the gallery or performance space — and as resting points for the eye, providing both refuge and prospect in a single space. (These were ideas that Frank Lloyd Wright wrestled with when he created his open-plan houses so many years ago.)
Meanwhile, the owner, who has three daughters, hung empty white canvases on the walls in the center of the room; each one has a Lucite name plate, anticipating the day each daughter will fill in her canvas. Until then, the blank canvases look intentional. While the furniture, all custom-made in jewel-tone velvets, is upholstered and vaguely ’40s in style, there is a black leather Mies chaise up against the north-facing glass wall.
“That was sort of a joke,” Ridless said.
A case study
On a recent Friday morning, Jane Gorrell and James Lansill offered themselves up as a case study of glass apartment living. There were bowls half-filled with oatmeal on the white Corian island of their second-floor apartment in the third Richard Meier building at Charles Street — remnants of their twins’ breakfast (Lucinda and Quinn, age 5 1/2, were at school) — along with two coffee cups, a raft of papers and a pair of socks. In the twins’ bedroom, across the midsection of each of the clean white scrim shades mandated and installed by the building was a wild squiggle of black crayon, applied by Quinn during a particularly epic time out, his mother said.
(The Meier tower across the courtyard is not the voyeur’s paradise you’d expect; on that morning, it seemed like every shade in the Perry Street building to the north was drawn, except for those in the apartment one floor up from Gorrell and Lansill’s, where white sheer curtains fluttered, voluptuous and defiant. “We’re the only show on every night here,” Gorrell said, pointing out that many of her neighbors don’t live here — or anywhere — full-time.)
There was Midcentury Modern furniture about, but it was Italian, and purple velvet. A fluffy blue and green geometric rug was ’70s vintage, and a swoopy orange chair shaped like a wave was 10 years older. One light brown Eames chair sat with its back to the glass wall overlooking the West Side Highway, a holdout from Gorrell and Lansill’s former, pre-Meier building life.
Two years ago, they were living in a huge TriBeCa loft, with huge, pale furniture (like a 13-foot sectional couch), a “baronial” antique carved wooden bed from Italy — “that if he’d seen it would have sent Richard Meier to the hospital,” Lansill said — and a lot of Eames from eBay, none of which, they quickly realized, fit here.
Gorrell, 43, described a tense month last year when they were co-habiting with two sets of everything. “Two sofas, two dining room tables and chairs, two 4-year-olds,” she said, arching an eyebrow at Lansill, 46, whom she described as a man with a serious jones for contemporary furniture. He’d been buying on 1stdibs.com, trying to solve the conundrum of how to make their old stuff fit into this new environment. “It seems impossible to make a space like this claustrophobic,” Gorrell said, “but we managed.”
Planting the sofa
Lansill, who is a managing director of the Sunshine Group, the company that marketed all three Meier buildings, fell hard for this building during his punch-list walk-throughs with the contractor two years ago, though his Sunshine status did not earn him a discount. He and Gorrell paid full price for two apartments: a 1,750-square-foot one-bedroom (with two baths and a dining room) cost $2.95 million; the 700-square-foot studio behind cost $1.4 million. They combined the two by punching a door through the back of their bedroom.
Last year, Lansill was working 15-hour days and Gorrell was home juggling twins and moving the 13-foot sofa around. “I thought if we could get it in the right spot,” she said, “we could make everything work.”
Adam Rolston, an architect friend, played furniture shrink. “The deal I made was that James couldn’t buy anything more unless Adam approved it,” Gorrell said. And Rolston helped them weed out the old for the more diminutive new.
He then rearranged what was left on a different axis. Turns out 165 Charles Street is not a rectangle, but a trapezoid, a tricky shape to fit furniture into.
“When I was at architecture school, Richard Meier was like a god,” said Rolston. “So I knew that one of Meier’s tenets was simultaneity. What that means is that different grids can co-exist in one space and still be legible. Classical architecture, as a point of comparison, has one grid.”
“In this building,” he continued, “one grid aligns to the streets behind, to the east, and another grid lines up to the West Side Highway. So shifting the furniture to the highway grid pulls the furniture into that landscape.”
“It was like an electric current ran through everything,” Lansill said. “It was like we could breathe again,” Gorrell added.
Perhaps the only thing that glass box dwellers have in common is an awareness that all city life is a bit of a performance. Last summer, Lansill filled the space harvested from the new grid with a Steinway grand piano, an object chosen as much for its aesthetics as its utility. “I’d always wanted to learn how to play,” Lansill said.
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Eye-stopping tricks
Here’s what the pros have to say about living with transparency:
Consider a banana tree: If a glass apartment is “a huge volume with all this light coming in,” said Jessica Shaw, a principal of Moment Design, there’s an obvious need “to have objects that stop the eye.” Shaw used a banana tree in a glassy living room to break up and frame the views.
Embrace the urban landscape: “If you think of the windows as the dominant element, or like wallpaper, you want to respond with colors, textures and materials that are harmonious,” said Adam Rolston, an architect at Inc. Architecture & Design. “New York light is cool and gray, so you can embrace that or try to do battle with it with colors that are more saturated.”
Shrug off Minimalist domination: “Just because one has a modern space, that does not always dictate the design,” said designer Miles Redd. “If you have things around you that you love, you are always happy. The glass box just allows you to see them a little better.”
Shield that view: “There’s a very old feng shui tradition that says you shouldn’t enter a place and look straight out a window,” said Sarah Rossbach, the author of feng shui books including “Interior Design With Feng Shui” (Penguin, $15.95, 240 pages). Money and opportunity will come in, she suggested, but they’ll go right back out again.
No fingerprints allowed: Jennifer Post, a designer of glossy, minimal spaces advises: Find an expert window washer and keep him on a regular schedule. (Post washes her windows once a month.)
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— Penelope Green