Someone has built a charming rooftop cottage in downtown New York City and you can buy it
The Big Apple is full of innovation, charm and unusual thinking. This penthouse in Greenwich Village is all of those and more.
New York is one of those cities where you must always expect to see the unexpected. It’s a cliché for sure, but in the Big Apple it is a pertinent one. You cannot squeeze 8.5 million people into such a small space and not expect to see an odd assortment of things.
That strangeness breeds beauty. As mayor Zohran Mamdani correctly identified in his speech celebrating the NBA Championship winning New York Knickerbockers, this city and its residents are endlessly resilient. They find ways to make things work, in ways you wouldn’t expect. So, for the trained New Yorker, of course it makes sense to build a small New-England style cottage on top of an apartment building in Greenwich Village. Where else would you put it?
Not a bad place for your morning coffee or evening cocktail.
This delight is currently for sale with The Full Ask for the sum of $10.5 million. Is it the finest house in New York City? It is unlikely, but it is certainly one of the more interesting and tasteful manifestations of a penthouse that I can remember seeing for some time.
Set over two floors, the property offers a fraction over 3,000sq ft of living space, which translates into four bedrooms and two bathrooms. The majority of the home can be found on the ‘first floor’ (which is actually the sixth floor), where the current owners have created a welcoming and spacious living area ideal for entertaining.
The highlight is a vast and open dining-kitchen-living area, which occupies most of the floor. Three bedrooms are also on this floor, of which one is currently used as an office. The primary bedroom occupies the corner and offers a dual aspect, as well as a walk-in closet and en-suite bathroom. The fourth bedroom can be found in the mezzanine space between the first and second floors.
The living-room area, with functioning fireplace.
The open-plan kitchen and dining room.
Of course, it all looks very nice, but the star of the show must certainly be the terrace and roof garden, with its corresponding ‘cottage’. The structure and ‘the meadow’ were built in 2003, to the drawings of the architect Lawrence Tobe. About 1,200sq ft of sedum sits on about seven inches of soil, underneath which are drainage and protective layers.
The rooftop balcony feels like it could have been pulled off a beach from New England.
Sadly, Country Life isn’t the first magazine to discover the beauty of this property. The New York Times covered it in 2006, National Geographic in 2009 and it was photographed by George Steinmetz in 2015, publishing the pictures in Gothamist.
The views over downtown New York are, of course, sublime. To the south, One World Trade Center stands tall and to the north, the towers of Hudson Yards and the Empire State Building. Near neighbours include, but are not limited to, Taylor Swift.
