Architect Breaks Down 6 Luxury Apartments from Billions, Gossip Girl & More | Architectural Digest

hi i'm michael white star i've been an architect for 33 years and today we're gonna look at the evolution of luxury living in new york city through movies and TV shows Longfellow deeds apartment and mr. deeds yes sir the last 35 years of his astonishing life so here's everything jumps out at me this grand stone staircase with this beautiful wrought iron railing these huge columns framing the entrance this sort of exotic lion like sculptures this huge Persian rug and these palm fronds which are very indicative of the way rich people lived in the 1920s when it appears this apartment would have been from although this is a set and it appears somewhat fantastical in reality people lived in apartments like this with these huge ceiling lights combining multiple floors and that called for a grand staircase like the one you see in front of you so in reality you know like a 740 Park Avenue a very famous building for the wealthy there are like three-story apartment up there that have 37 to 40 rooms in them so they really are mansions in the sky in fact it became quite common for developers to sort of take a tract of land that was inhabited by a mansion and part of the deal to sell would be that they would recreate that mansion at the top of the apartment building for the original owner so in this image we're looking down from the great balcony and you could really see how fast the apartment is Wow that's an echo you could see this beautiful marble floor and at the time these were built labor was so cheap so you could have the finest craftsmen from around the world come and create these palatial apartments and in the distance you could see this grand elevator which is somewhat fictitious because in actuality when these apartments were built in the 1920s elevators were much much smaller usually just three or four passengers in fact it's so big you can see that there's a couch in it but that's not unusual many of the elevators that were originally built even though they were small they usually contained a chair for the resident to sit in on their way up to their grand apartment so when you actually look in the elevator besides that extremely over stuffed sofa with the Lions on the edges you could see these sort of pilasters which are like columns built into the wall so quite often pilasters more structural there was just a part of the wall that needed to carry a larger load usually a beam sat on top of it but it's built into the wall in this case they have purely decorative because we're inside an elevator car it's not holding up anything Nate's Upper East Side townhouse on Gossip Girl ok so here's everything that jumps out at me to me this looks like it was built at the turning of the century it's a London townhouse elevated just a little off the street it's got this articulated stone base it has this somewhat grand entrance but still at a small scale it has these limestone coins at the corners and this brick infill between it and it has this curved bay window above the entrance so a London townhouse is different from a traditional New York City brownstone in that it's only elevated a little bit above the street where a brownstone in New York to please elevate it a complete story about the street what's called the piano noble' or the parlor floor in English and that's the main floor of the house underneath is sort of a lower level that's reserved for servants and service people entering the building and that was done basically to avoid the mess that were in New York City streets in the 1800s from all the horses but the London townhouses were typically built in much tonier neighborhoods and there was less mess in those neighborhoods so they could afford to be closer to the street the windows in the bay window are composed of small lights as they call them it's very small panes of glass today all glass is insulated which means there's two panes with an air gap between but in the early days that technology didn't exist certainly in 1910 when this house was built so everything was made out of single pane glass and usually very thin you know eighth of an inch the little frames between pieces of glass are called mullions and you could see them over here on the sides of the windows and over here the mullions were made out of lead and that is why it's called leaded glass and that goes all the way back to the stained glass you see in churches and lent is a really soft metal and it's very pliable and that's how you can get all these really nice shapes and create these sort of scenes so let's move to the interior where do you think you're going anywhere but here what distilled straights I think really well is that these sorts of townhouses only had light available to come in at the front and the back so the middle part of the building was traditionally kind of dark and the living spaces would always be where the light was so because the light is only available at the front and the back it forms like a dumbbell implant where the larger rooms are at the ends and the middle is sort of constricted with all these sort of service spaces so light is only available to come in the front and the back but because it's always a house next door like can't get in so typically the second floor would be the main floor where most of the living was done or most of the spaces where the living room the dining room and the ground floor would be for the more mundane and service tasks the kitchen would be down there some storage would be down there but it would be more like a transition space and then people would take a grand staircase up to the second floor where there was much more light available and it was a much brighter space so this house is a perfect representation of old money in New York and it works perfectly for the Archibald family in gossip girl Bobby Axelrod's penthouse in billions is that always the way you do business yeah yeah this appears to be a real penthouse right away you could see the double-height glass the exposed concrete columns with their really crisp corners and you see the step up to the roof beyond and you could see that it's a real penthouse that it's surrounded by a roof with all these really beautiful plantings surrounding it so typically pent houses were built for the servants they were the servants quarters up here was a small shanty built on the roof it was really hot in the summer and it was really cold in the winter but people started to realize wait a minute these spaces could be kind of desirable servants quite often outfitted these beautiful gardens with potted plants all around there and the views were really great from up there so people realized and developers especially wait a minute we could market these as really exclusive apartments not only that but typically there was only one per building and they became the ultimate in New York and urban living so this after space is really a luxury especially in New York and it's a real sign of wealth especially one that's this large it's extremely desirable and it's a luxury but it really grew out of necessity and it grew out of owning laws that required these sort of setbacks that created these outdoor spaces I usually see jealousy turning to the other thing so prior to 1916 there was one particular building that went up down on Wall Street Manhattan called the equitable building and it went straight up for 30 stories or so and it caused a great outcry in the city because people were concerned that the sunlight would be blocked so in 1916 the city enacted a new set of zoning laws wherein buildings had to set back after a certain height so before the 1916 zoning laws if this is the street and there's a person standing on the street you were able to build a building you just go straight up and there's your building and obviously that cast a huge shadow so what the 1916 zoning laws attempted to do was you go up for a certain height and then you'd have to set back and then you could go up again until you hit what's called the sky exposure plane which is dictated in the zoning and once you hit that plane you'd have to go back again and then you could go up again and then you'd have to go back again and this is where the penthouse would sit right but then each one of these becomes an outdoor terrace and these floors become extremely desirable so after those zoning ordinances went to effect those setbacks help define the New York City skyline to this day so these sort of wedding cake style buildings that set back are ubiquitous across the New York City skyline and you could see it in the Empire State Building and in the Chrysler Building unlike in a city like Chicago that has very different setback laws where you can build straight up you get a very different skyline the valmont house and Cruel Intentions there's no parking sir you can't park sir so there's a perfect example of the kinds of mansions that were built along Fifth Avenue in the late 1800s and early 1900s it was called Millionaire's Row along Fifth Avenue and today many of them have been converted to museums and consulates and Institute's Carnegie built his mansion there Otto Kahn built his mansion there the Warburg's built their mansion there and it just marches all the way up the street so let's take a look at a clearer image of this what jumps out at me is there's this tympanum entrance with grand wooden doors there's the remnants of what would have been a Rose window in a church above the doors this is beautifully articulated Gothic style bay window there's these small font like windows which are probably used for a bathroom and there's a blind window next to it for symmetry sake there are these beautifully articulated dormers in the roof with these finials on the top there's this large architectural element of the clustered chimneys together and there's a really really steep roof line which made it easier to inhabit the Attic floors which are traditionally where the servants lived so this is very reminiscent of like a French chateau or French Renaissance architecture but there's also elements of Gothic architecture which the French did exceedingly well in all their beautiful churches typically on those old gothic churches there would be what's called a tympanum entrance it's this layered sort of folding back almost like an ear which is how it gets its name and I find it really interesting enough to keep the symmetry line which the architect created here this local symmetry that this small window which was probably used for a bathroom is then mirrored on the other side as a blind window which means it's not a window at all they just filled it in with stone there's elements of a mansard roof you could see this flat portion over here and the really steep incline of the gable which allowed people to inhabit the space underneath that roof or the Attic a lot more easily than they could if the pitch was much lower the house just to the left in this photo is a even clearer example of that kind of roof and the mannchild roof was developed by the architect named mance art in Paris in the 1600s to skirt zoning laws at the time so in Paris in the 1600s I believe you're only able to build five storeys tall and then have on top and it's difficult to inhabit that's these sort of edges and you lose a lot of the space but Mansart figured out a way that if you made the pitch of the roof much steeper that you could actually get an extra floor out of it and you can inhabit that floor I think this is a really cool house it's a little spooky because of all that sort of Gothic ornamentation and I think that fits in really well with the people who lived here in the movie it gives you the indication that maybe some nefarious activities are going on within the Dakota building in Rosemary's Baby so this is the Dakota building a very famous building in New York City which has a lot of history and actually represents a distinct shift in the way that rich people and extremely wealthy people started to live in New York so the first thing that jumps out at me is this a window along the exterior that's topped by this dome it has this very steep roof with all of these dormers most likely whose four servants quarters it has this dry moat as we call it which is an area way that surrounds the edge of the building along the sidewalk it's made of light tan brick and it has this grand entrance into our courtyard so previously people lived in these sort of grand townhouses and mansions and this was an effort by a developer named Clark to lure people away from that kind of living and come into this apartment style living which at that time in the 1880s was not very popular she's trying to get you lower the rent so the other thing that jumps out at me is the lack of fire escapes apartment houses at the time in the 1880s were mainly tenements those always had fire escapes on them and the architect wanted this to look distinctly different from that and he was one of the first to make everything out of fireproof material so all the walls brick and the floors are made of concrete and filled with mud that was harvested from Central Park it was fire proofing it also acted as sound dampening so it was called the Dakota because it was actually being made fun of because it was so far uptown and so far west that people said it might as well be in the Dakota Territory which wasn't even a state yet but Edward Clark to his credit embraced that and use that as the name of the building before this the east side where all the rich people live nobody of any means would live on the west side it just wasn't chic or fashionable so not only were they trying to lure people to a different way of living they were trying to lure people to a different area of living as well yeah well God knows I had walked all the theaters from here oh so one of the ways the developer was trying to lure extremely wealthy people out of their town houses and mansions and into an apartment was to offer a number of amenities very much like a hotel would one of them was his grand dining room on the ground floor they had a kitchen dedicated solely to making pastries there were 150 servants to cater to the needs of all the residents so it was a different style of living that the developer was trying to create and the building was the first to introduce service elevators in New York City that the staff could take so that they wouldn't have to ride in the same elevators as wealthy people who live there each passenger elevator served only two apartments those elevators were powered by hydraulics which is water in a piston under great pressure the building actually supplied its own water and harvested the rainwater to use in these hydraulics at the same time the building also produced its own electricity with a steam plant the steam plant was underneath the lot next door where there were tennis courts and there was a rose garden which bloomed all year because of the warmth from the steam so the other amenity that this building offered were views of Central Park but at that time the servants actually got the best views because they were always at the top of the building in 1884 when the building was built elevators were still kind of a new thing and people were weary of them so to bring people up to you know the seventh floor was a big ask so all these elevators were highly ornamented built out of this beautiful woodwork they always had someone who operated it with that hand crank and there was these multiple gates but it was done in a way that made it very ritualistic and they were much smaller than you would see today this is a shot of the entrance from 72nd Street which is the main entrance into the courtyard it has a sad history John Lennon was shot right in this entrance where they're standing and what jumps out at me in this image is this really sort of grand that leads you into the courtyard within you could see the Roman brick here which is different from traditional brick in that Roman brick it's flatter and longer Frank Lloyd Wright was a big fan of the Roman brick because his prairie style architecture he always wanted it to be as horizontal as possible reaching out into the landscape and the Roman brick reinforced that the building also had a history of sort of haunted lore people said they saw ghosts and specters in this building for years so there's a long and sort of spooky history to the Dakota which is one of the reasons why it was selected by the director for Rosemary's Baby [Music] Josh Baskins Loft in big okay so what immediately jumps out at me are the large windows that surround the apartment giving it a ton of natural light the plain wood floors just strip flooring they're just simple plywood cabinetry underneath the windows that helps to conceal the radiators and create some storage space you could see this industrial clear plastic curtain over there that you'd find on a loading dock so originally these lofts which were typically in Soho in these beautiful cast-iron buildings were used for manufacturing but as the manufacturers left New York these floors were left vacant and artists realized that these were perfect spaces for making art with all the natural light in the wide open space and so quite often they moved in illegally and made these spaces habitable putting in their own plumbing where it didn't exist but they were living in areas that was owned for manufacturing and that's not permitted so laws were passed called the loft laws that allowed artists to live in these spaces and allowed landlords to fix them up for the artists so eventually all these spaces were Riis owned for residential and the artists were priced out and had to move on and find other neighborhoods to make their art in so for the very reason that artists found these spaces desirable because they were filled with light and they were wide open sort of blank canvases Josh Baskin is this little kid living in the adult body found the loft was perfect for exactly his use which was just basically to fill it with all of his toys nicer so now the apartments you know they they become redone and finished and polished and they become something totally antithetical than what they were originally intended to be by the artists and they go for a ton of money the way luxury has been defined in New York City has changed drastically over time and I think that's really reflected in the spaces that we looked at today and the characters that inhabit them

Channel: Architectural Digest

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Keywords: billions, gossip girl, luxury apartment, cruel intentions, nyc apartment, expensive apartment, nyc mansion, expensive nyc apartment, mr deeds, rosemarys baby, expensive homes, nyc house, milion dollar homes, expensive real estate, new york apartment, luxury apartment tour, million dollar apartment nyc, apartment apartments, mansion tour, inside mansion, nyc mansion tour, billions apartments, gossip girl apartment, cruel intentions apartment, architectural digest

Id: e4sNfERt41o

Length: 17min 31sec (1051 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 05 2019