The stripping away of the white brick slapped onto the steel frame of the old Tiffany & Co. building on Union Square West was done mostly behind a funeral shroud. But now that the luxury condo conversion has progressed to the point where the fancy model is making potential buyers swoon, the curious public has been granted a long-awaited look at all that heavy metal. The steel arches will be wrapped in glass, like a museum artifact with its own valet parking, and some glass is now visible. HOT, but we're still not sold on that rooftop addition.
· 15 Union Square West [15usw.com]
· Curbed's 15 Union Square West coverage [Curbed]
1) They won't let us in the building, but the Times' new development sizer-upper Suzanne Slesin had no trouble getting a look at 15 Union Square West. Everyone has been talking about what the designers did with the tall arched windows of the original Tiffany and Co. building, and now we finally see it. The dog-run views must be mesmerizing. And adorable! [Window Shopping/Suzanne Slesin]
2) Some may think that The Ludlow, the massive luxury rental building on the Lower East Side, is targeting "fratty douchebag investment bankers" with their marketing, but you'll be surprised to find out that the building's first ever tenant was a woman in her 40s. How she got around the snipers, we're not quite sure. [Habitats/Dan Shaw]
3) Corcoran Sunshine just spent $100,000 to produce 85,000 copies of a glorified sales brochure for Riverhouse that explains how eco-friendly the building is (look for it in a garbage can near you). Also, 15 units in the eco-madness Toren have sold this month. [Posting/C.J. Hughes]
4) Living in Midtown may seem like a nightmare to most people, but not to a computer geek and his wife who moved to New York from Boston to take a job at Google. Being a nerd, here's part of his hunting strategy: "Mr. Bolay listed each building’s walking time to work, assuming one minute per street block and three minutes per avenue block, and calculated the value of his travel time according to his salary." No wonder Long Island City didn't make the cut. [The Hunt/Joyce Cohen]
5) The Department of City Planning announced a rezoning plan for five neighborhoods on the Rockaway Peninsula, including Far Rockaway, the Hamptons of the '30s long since ruined by crappy development. No more high-rises casting shadows on the beach? It could be too little too late. [The City/James Angelos]
Now that the initial burst of excitement following the reveal of 15 Union Square West has subsided, it's time for the team at Brown Harris Stevens SELECT to tackle the hard part: selling the 36 condos in the glassed-up former home of Tiffany & Co. A more complete website for the building has launched, featuring one of the more annoying new-development-website soundtracks out there and a new clunker of a tagline, "Unbelievable and livable." Yikes. And in much bigger news, a glance at StreetEasy shows that the first crop of listings have hit the web—nine to be exact—not counting the two apartments that are already in contract. The average price-per-square-foot of the combined 11 listings is a healthy $2,585, or 1,691 euros. There appear to be a couple extra bathroom renderings, but for the most part, we've seen what we're dealing with here. The prices on the available listings range from a $4.11 million 2BR to an $8.946 million whopper of a 3BR. Happy shopping, and don't forget to tip the valet.
· 15 Union Square West [Official Site]
· Every 15 Union Square West Floorplan: Units 1-12 [Curbed]
· Every 15 Union Square West Floorplan: Units 13-24 [Curbed]
· Every 15 Union Square West Floorplan: Units 25-36 [Curbed]
Then: $8,000,000 Now: $6,950,000 You Save!: $1,050,000
Spotted in the wild: the rare million-dollar pricechop. For a while, 8 Union Square South had a good thing going—the only new-construction luxury condo building on Union Square. But now, 15 Union Square West is the new show in town, and 8USS's faults can no longer be hidden from doe-eyed luxury buyers. It's a glorified sliver building, and the corner of 14th Street and University Place is an absolute shitshow. Plus, 8USS's concierge service is trumped by 15USW's concierge service with a splash of valet parking. And so, Penthouse 2, meet the Chopper. You may become good friends over time.
· Listing: 8 Union Square South [BHS]
· CurbedWire: Controversy at The Ellies?, 8USS Goes Neon [Curbed]
· Development Update-o-rama: 8USS in Tip-Top Shape [Curbed]
Depending on your take, 15 Union Square West is either a visually striking update to the 139-year-old former home of Tiffany & Co., or the architectural equivalent of kicking dirt on the grave of history. But no matter what side you fall on, 15 Union Square West has arrived, and it must be reckoned with. The Sun's dapper boy wonder Bradley Hope reports today that developer Brack Capital and Brown Harris Stevens' Shlomi Reuveni quietly began marketing the 36 apartments this week, and to build more anticipation for 15 USW's glass-wrapped iron arches, the façade will remain shrouded until it's completed later this year. Prices start at $4 million for two-bedroom units, and three-bedrooms start at $6 million. According to Reuveni, there has been "strong interest from foreign buyers and those wishing to own larger spaces," and combo jobs may be in the offing. And here's an interesting little perk: the building will have valet parking, thanks to a partnership with a nearby garage. What better way for foreign buyers to enjoy that Union Square vibe without, you know, having to actually deal with it?
· Condos at Former Tiffany Headquarters Hit the Market [Sun]
· Every 15 Union Square West Floorplan: Units 1-12 [Curbed]
· Every 15 Union Square West Floorplan: Units 13-24 [Curbed]
· Every 15 Union Square West Floorplan: Units 25-36 [Curbed]
1) OK, so here's the deal with 15 Union Square West (above). It's hard to tell from the rendering, but the shaded glass around the original structure—the 1870 Tiffany & Co. building—is wrapped around the cast iron arches that were revealed when the white brick facade was stripped away. Says the marketing broker: "We tried to encase the cast iron in glass as if it was a piece of art." [Big Deal/Josh Barbanel]
2) An interesting survey of what's up in Far Rockaway reveals that the rebounding Queens neighborhood—once the getaway of choice for the A-list in a pre-Hamptons era—is now suffering from overdevelopment and the subprime mortgage crisis. In fact, 50 out of the 180 homes for sale in the area are being sold by banks. Ouch. [Living In/C.J. Hughes]
3) There is a dearth of super-expensive apartments up for sale in Manhattan's trophy buildings, so the competition is heating up. The first two resales in 15 Central Park West are already in contract, including one sealed-bid auction after the owners were "besieged with offers" for their $12.5 million apartment. And an apartment in the Pierre was sold to a European buyer for $7,000-$8,000 per square foot. [Big Deal/Josh Barbanel]
Our glance at the apartments in the newly revealed15 Union Square West continues with Part III of floorplan mania. For the finale, we've got the big-balling spreads, outdoor space and all. And to kick it all off, here's the penthouse. Outdoor fireplace! Private pool!
Click to expand. Unit 36: 3BR, 3.5BA; Indoor: 3,164sf; 2,026sf; 12th Floor
3) Red Hook: When is our sprawling blue-and-yellow friend going to open? The rumor mill says August, and Ikea says sometime during the summer.
4) Midtown East: To say that people are pissed off about the Georgette Klinger spa shutterings is an understatement. One email calls it "one of the worst closings I have ever heard of" and there are many reasons why.
Yesterday was the long-awaited reveal of 15 Union Square West, the luxury condo conversion of the old home of Tiffany's that was built in 1870 and stripped in 2007. The password-protected website couldn't hold us back from sharing this love-it-or-hate-it building in one of the city's most visible locations, and it won't stop us from now taking a look at the actual apartments. So—coming at you like a landmark scorned—every 15 Union Square West floorplan, broken up into three parts for easy digestion. The plans include square-meter figures along with square-footage, but we're only including numbers born and bred in the good ol' US of A. Foreign investors will have to do their own dirty work.
Earlier, we expressed our chagrin at 15 Union Square West's password-protected website. Well, it didn't take long for some Curbed commenters to crack open the safe of Brack Capital's luxury condo conversion of the 1870 home of Tiffany & Co. Behold! Initial thoughts: Is that some original arched detail near the bottom? Hard to tell. As for the top? We'll go ahead and call it "modern." The building's interior design is being handled by Vicente Wolf Associates. The swimming pool may blow your mind. Today, some of the sweet, sweet renderings we dug up. Tomorrow we'll look at some floorplans.
15 Union Square West is the old home of Tiffany's that's currently being converted to condos and trashed for scrap. It's also—due to its funeral shroud and initial lack of publicity materials—one of the biggest mysteries here at Curbed HQ. What's this thing going to look like? The answers are on 15 Union Square West's brand new website, except for one small problem: the sucker is password protected. MFers! This little tease campaign has been done before, at One Madison Park, also marketed by Brown Harris Stevens. But will 15 USW pull in those 1MP numbers? Even doubters can't deny the building's plum location.
· 15 USW [15usw.com]
· Tiffany's Old Home is Trashed for Scrap [Curbed]
· Tiffany's Jewel Buffed Down to Inner Beauty [Curbed]
Broker-blogger extraordinaire Andrew Fine checks in with the denuding of 15 Union Square West, which was the grand original home of Tiffany's before being covered in bland white brick and serving as an Amalgamated bank. Lately it's been shrounded in black, as the building undergoes a conversion to—wait for it—condos. The cool thing is that the building's original steel frame is partially visible, giving history geeks and archinerds a chance to ogle. Amalgamated sold the building in November for $80 million to Brack Capital, who enlisted Perkins Eastman to oversee the conversion. Corcoran will market and sell this blockbuster-in-waiting when the time comes.
· Secrets of 15 Union Square West...Future Condo, Past Jewel [A Fine Blog]
· Brack planning luxury conversion at Tiffany building [Real Estate Weekly]
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Depending on your take, 15 Union Square West is either a 
