A DESIGN-SAVVY friend called. She had an appointment in the just-opened sales office of the Metal Shutter Houses, an 11-story condominium designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, in what is now West Chelsea.
I’m a big fan of Mr. Ban’s work. I love the way he uses ordinary materials to create sublime spaces. I have dreamed about living in the house in Tokyo he designed with its cloudlike billowing curtains. I was eager to see what he would come up with for a luxury building in Manhattan.
Mr. Ban’s project, at 524 West 19th Street, is being developed by Jeff Spiritos, the president of HEEA Development L.L.C., and Klemens Gasser, a Chelsea art dealer. It was still a hole in the ground when we visited, the site shoehorned between the IAC headquarters building by Frank Gehry (love that cool iceberg) and another glass-and-steel building by Annabelle Seldorf. The two buildings give that block of 19th Street a lunar feeling, which was heightened by the gray light of late autumn.
I hurried across the street to find my friend already looking at floor plans in the sales office. If I had been a serious buyer I would have been, too. The office had only been open a few days, but the units were going fast.
Inside, Madeline Hult, a sales director at the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, was turning on the video that demonstrated the condo’s star turn: the series of retractable perforated metal shutters and big windows that allow the apartments to be wide open to the elements.
Love it, I thought. But I was also wary of power failures, and couldn’t help but wonder how practical it was to have those windows in a city with good weather only half of the year. But soon, my friend and I were being swept away by the sheer ingenuity of the scheme and the opening and closing, appearing and disappearing metal shutters in an extraordinary architectural ballet.
We were in a trance as Ms. Hult was describing walls that slipped away to disappear behind cabinets, 20-foot ceilings, staircases with glass banisters, radiant heat in the floors and the all-white kitchens and bathrooms sculptured out of Corian.
The project, in which Mr. Ban collaborated with the New York architect Dean Maltz, is, at least for me, a fantasy of modern living: a pure and yet high-tech space that can be open to the air and views. On the inside, nothing will interrupt the smoothness of the surfaces.
“Shigeru does not like to show air-conditioning ducts,” Ms. Hult said. Come to think of it, neither do I.
But actually living up to living here was another issue. The sky-high prices were, of course, a restraint. But strangely, so were the elegance, clarity and transparency of the spaces. I’m way too messy and too much of a collector; I’d sully the perfection of the rooms. On the other hand, maybe I was just being defensive.
Of the original eight units only two are still available: Unit 6 has 4,644 square feet and is a full-floor duplex with four bedrooms, five bathrooms, a library, a dining room and five private outdoor spaces. It has a price tag of $10.25 million. Unit 7 has 1,949 square feet of space with three bedrooms, three bathrooms and three outdoor spaces for $4.1 million.
The prices take one’s breath away, but my friend was still interested. She’s worried that she could only move in with a few pieces of clothing, and that her grandchildren would have to leave their toys at home.
But maybe if all goes well, she’ll invite me over.
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