Luxury condo tower 180 East 88th Street is scheduled to dominate the skyline in an area that has an affinity for low-rise buildings.
The property, which is set for completion in 2018, is planned to stretch to 521 feet in height, making it the tallest building on the Upper East Side and north of 72nd Street.
However, according to James Lansill, the senior managing director of Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, the building’s selling point is not just its record-setting height.
“It will have the marriage of commanding views from approximately midway up, with exceptionally high ceilings. There are tall buildings on the Upper East Side, but they don’t have high ceilings and they are pre-war buildings. Some of the turn-of-the-century ones have fairly high ceilings, but they’re not as high. It’s got some very unique characteristics that were combined to make it pretty compelling,” he said.
The property, which is being developed by DDG Partners, contains 48 apartments that combine to propagate a look that is unusual for the neighborhood.
Lansill described it as “understated modernism,” which stems from demand for Upper East Side apartments that have a “contemporary” look.
“It’s a building that has a very strong contemporary voice in the neighborhood, which makes it very distinctive,” he said.
The contemporary experience involves ceiling heights that stretch from 14 feet and two inches to 28 feet and eight inches, hand-made bricks imported from Europe and nine foot tall windows.
“They can’t help themselves. They’re obsessed. They’re ambitious and they want to change the architecture of the city with their own imprint,” Lansill said, referring to DDG.
The apartments are fairly large compared to the typical new development luxury units coming out of the pipeline. Two bedroom units occupy 1,410 s/f of space, three bedrooms are at 2,076 s/f while four bedrooms come to about 2,366 s/f.
“These are very generous-sized rooms. A lot of the living rooms are very square, which is easier to furnish than a lot of the long and narrow living rooms that we find in typical New York residences.
“They’re the same size or actually slightly larger than 432 Park Avenue, but they’re in such a large volume of space. There’s also a lot of wall space, so it’s an art collector’s dream to have,” Lansill said.
Prices for the apartments start at $3.2 million for two-bedroom units. This ramps up to $4.7 million for three-bedrooms and $6.6 million for four-bedrooms. The blended asking price for the apartments are at $3,000 per s/f.
Currently, the most expensive listing for the property is unit 42, which is two floors below the penthouse. The unit, which contains four bedrooms and four bathrooms, comes with an asking price of $15.5 million.
According to Lansill, some people are asking to combine apartments. “We’ve had multiple people talking to us about the possibility of combinations. We even have a particular part of the building that we have on hold for combinations and we’re talking to some people about selling some of those in combination.ˮ
The building contains about 10,000 s/f of amenities, which includes a wine room for hosting wine tasting parties, a children’s playroom designed by the Children’s Museum of the Arts and an indoor soccer pitch.
According to Lansill, the building appeals to a new variant of Upper East Side resident. He described buyers as people who want to reside in the sweet spot between the neighborhood’s traditional aesthetics and the conveniences of modern homes.
“It’s somewhat radical for the neighborhood and we’re finding that buyers are really excited about that,ˮ he said.
“A lot of new construction today has an extremely traditional look, because they assume that’s what buyers want. But it turns out there’s a lot of people who want to live on the Upper East Side and have a more contemporary experience. We’re filling a very unique place in the market.”
