40 Bond Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 40 Bond Street by Carter Horsley

When it was announced in 2005, this 11-story, mid-block building at 40 Bond Street in NoHo quickly became the city’s “wow” building.

It was the first residential project of the Swiss architectural firm of Herzog & de Meuron and it took window-surround façade elements found in SoHo, NoHo and NoLiTa and substituted luscious green glass for traditional cast-iron, creating a soft-emerald, jewel-like effect. 

Furthermore, the lower two stories were fronted with a very complex, undulating, sculptural cast-aluminum fence that was 22 feet high in places.  The random, spider-like web of its design was repeated on the bronze walls behind the fence and in the building’s lobby. The architects said they were inspired by the city’s graffiti tradition.

Located on a charming cobblestone street between Lafayette Street and The Bowery, 40 Bond Street contains 27 condominium apartments, many with terraces, including five townhouses with private front entrances and rear gardens, and a triplex penthouse.

The building, which was developed by Ian Schrager and Aby Rosen and his partner Michael Fuchs, was completed in 2007.

Bottom Line

Leonard Bernstein might rise from the dead and write another version of “It’s cool, man” about this dazzler and Goldie Hawn is sure to serenade you with “Sock it to me” if you invite her to a party here.

As Candide might say, 40 Bond Street is the best of all buildings on the best of all blocks in the best of all cities!

Description

Architect Jacques Herzog has said that “the idea of gates came to us first,” adding that they “gave us a signature, a scale and an individuality.”

“Then we came up with the idea of something very chaotic which we thought could be seen as coming from urban street culture, where graffiti is part of the landscape.  So we took graffiti and manipulated it on the computer, the result is radical, but it was a classical process of transformation."

The "gate" extends the width of the mid-block project and is thematically repeated in the lobby where its design is etched onto Corian panels. The design of the gate conjures some of the highly intricate, lace-like Art Nouveau designs of Antonio Gaudi.

The lacey, aluminum gates suggest the ornateness of the French Quarter in New Orleans but also organic tentacles of the albino monsters that rule the city’s sewers allegedly.  If they are frilly and feminine, their allure is like Scylla and Charybdis, just “simply irresistible,” as Robert Palmer might chant.  It takes a while for one’s eyes to refocus and discover the “graffiti” patterns etched into the brass walls of the townhouses like ghost foliage.

When one begins to recover from the visual shock and looks upward one is refreshed by the sumptuous greenness of the thick, curved glass window surrounds.  Like large smooth glass Coca-Cola bottles, they are motherboards of fenestration for the computer age.

One can only gasp at the audacity of the architects and developers in preparing to confront the Not-In-My-Backyard mindset of the downtown community with this totally uncontextual building. 

Some buildings suggest a variety of influences and siblings and some buildings, like this one, are old telegrams that keep saying “stop.” 

40 Bond Street is an original “statement” but not of the “keep off the grass” kind.  It’s more a “Can you top this, my friend?”

Drum roll, please, we are about to take off….

Amenities

Residents have access to all of the services of the Gramercy Park Hotel including worldwide concierge service, 24-hour telephone switchboard for screening calls, taking and delivering messages and wake-up calls, access to all David Barton Gyms, and guaranteed entrance to all bars and events available to hotel guests. 

Residents also have signing privileges for all hotel services, access to its fitness center, meeting rooms and business center, packaging services, and check cashing privileges,

At 40 Bond, they have housekeeping service, bathroom amenity services, catering services, supervised childcare and babysitting services, messenger services, newspaper delivery to door, pet walking and sitting services, fresh flower service, valet parking, limousine service, and room service.

The two-story-high lobby at 40 Bond leads to a common garden in the rear and a fitness center in the basement.

Apartments

40 Bond Street has a total of 27 apartments including five, 3-story townhouse units with 22-foot-high living rooms and front yards behind the "gate."  Three of the townhouses are 25 feet wide and two are 17 feet wide and all have wood-burning fireplaces.

The other residential units have 11-foot-high ceilings and floor-to-ceiling, fully operable windows.

Units have dual gas and wood-burning fireplaces custom designed by Herzog & de Meuron. Floors are Austrian smoked wide-plank oak. Sliding pocket doors between Great Rooms and master bedroom suites, and "wet rooms" with seamless Glacier White Corian walls and shower floor embossed with a graffiti pattern, Vola tub and shower fixtures, and Miele washers and dryers. Fixtures include lighting by Jasper Morrison and kitchen appliances from Miele. 

Kitchens have Italian cabinets and pantry units finished in smoked oak and high gloss lacquer by Varenna, Glacier White Corian countertops, under-cabinet lighting, Miele cooktops and ovens and dishwashers, and Sub-Zero refrigerators.

The penthouse has 6,626 square feet of interior space and 3,529 square feet of exterior space.

Team

Herzog & de Meuron is the architectural firm famous for its design of the Tate Modern Museum in London, a twisting structure for the de Young Museum in San Francisco, a multi-faceted building for Prada in Tokyo and the main stadium for the Olympic Games in Beijing. The firm won the prestigious Pritzker Prize for Architecture in 2001.

Mr. Schrager gained famed as Steve Rubell's partner at Studio 54, the infamous New York disco of the late 1970s, and for his subsequent career as a hotelier whose projects included the Royalton and Paramount hotels in New York and the Delano in Miami. 

Mr. Rosen is a major figure in New York City real estate who is an owner of the Seagram Building and Lever House on Park Avenue.

Mr. Schrager and Mr. Rosen were also partners in the 50 Gramercy Park North development adjacent to the Gramercy Park Hotel where Mr. Schrager commissioned Julian Schnabel to do the interiors. 

Aby Rosen was also one of the developers at the spectacular One Jackson Square condominium.

History

A parking lot formerly occupied the 40 Bond Street site, which is east of Lafayette Street in NoHo.

In 2003, Mr. Schrager had planned a hotel for this site with Richard Born and Ira Drucker, but changed plans for a 14-story, 65-unit residential building designed by Gary Handel, whose firm Handel Architects remained involved in the project even after Mr. Schrager brought Herzog & de Meuron on board.  Mr. Schrager has said that he  considers Herzog & de Meuron “to be the most brilliant architects working today.”