Its massing is somewhat similar to another waterfront project completed a few years earlier several blocks to the south, Morton Square.

This one was developed by the Related Companies and was completed in 2008.

It was designed by Robert A. M. Stern, who is best known for 15 Central Park West, the Chatham and the Brompton.

Bottom line

A very prime location between the charms and quirkiness of the West Village and the hip sophistication of the Meatpacking District and West Chelsea and the High Line Park, this development offers buyers the choice of a tower and three-story townhouse living. The townhouses have elevators and gardens and have access to the tower through an underground corridor to access its many amenities.

Description

The light-orange brick tower has a one-story rusticated stone base, a few setbacks and many slightly arched windows. Its facade piers terminate in narrow ripples and its side facades have center protruding elements near the top.

The red-brick townhouses are extremely handsome and look like some of the best in Greenwich Village and Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Some have stoops and some have bay windows and all have multi-paned windows.

Amenities

The building, which is also known as 400 West 12th Street, has a 24-hour concierge and doorman, valet parking, a fitness center, an event room, a screening room, an entertainment lounge, a children’s playroom, a bicycle room, private storage, and some terraces.

The townhouses have their own garages.

Apartments

Some of the apartments in the tower have great layouts and range in size from one-bedrooms to four-bedrooms.

Kitchens have Sub-Zero appliances and master baths have free-standing tubs and marble and mosaic tiled surfaces and vanities. Morado ebony floors are standard.

One on the 11th floor has a long entrance foyer that leads to a 34-foot corner living room that opens onto 13-foot-long dining room. It also has a 29-foot-long corner media room that opens onto a 14-foot-long bedroom. There are three other bedrooms in this apartment.

A three-bedroom on the east side of the tower has a 31-foot-long living area that opens onto a media-library room with three bedrooms down a long corridor.

History

This was a very controversial project in the Far West Village.

It is on the former site of the Superior Ink factory that had two tall chimneys and it is just to the north of Westbeth, one of the best known residential conversion projects in the city.

The Related Companies originally proposed a 270-foot-high, 23-story structure with residential condominiums for the site and that design was similar in its configuration to its development at 445 Lafayette Street designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates that is notable for its sinuously curved glass-clad tower.

The project outraged preservationists who had desperately tried to save the old factory building and its 195-foot-tall smokestacks, urging the city to include the site in the West Village rezoning and historic district landmark districts. Community Board 2 voted against the project on the basis that all the findings necessary to obtain a variance had not been met and that its scale was out of context for the area.

In 2005, Related went to the Board of Standards & Appeals for a variance for a 20-story and three-story mixed-use project with a 6.5 F.A.R. for 469 West Street/70 Bethune Street on a lot zoned for manufacturing and a 5 floor-to-area ratio (F.A.R.). Gwathmey Siegel & Associates was the architect for the project.

In January, 2006, Related modified the design and won a variance, which was amended in January 2007, for a tower on West Street with a three-story townhouse row on Bethune Street, with a maximum height of 186 feet 9 inches, including a bulkhead on the tower roof, and setbacks of 10 feet on West Street and 15 feet on Bethune Street. (Three residential towers with mostly glass facades that were designed by Richard Meier a few blocks to the south on West Street have a height of 199 feet.)

The new plans presented in January 2007 were designed by a different architect, Robert A. M. Stern, who has worked on previous residential buildings for Related. Mr. Stern is the dean of the Yale University School of Architecture and a co-author of the monumental series on New York architecture and planning including "New York 1880," "New York, 1900," "New York, 1930," "New York, 1960," and the recently published "New York, 2000."

Stern’s new design had more masonry than the previous design that employed a lot of glass and it made the townhouses "independent of each other." Apartments are smaller but the number increased and commercial space on the ground floor of the tower has been eliminated. Basements were added to the townhouses that will now have different rather than similar facades. Their facades are made of bricks attached to precast concrete panels.

In June, 2007, new renderings of Stern’s design were released and on West Street, the development now has a three-story base with arched windows on the third floor and another setback on the fifth floor where the windows are arched and a tower with arched corner windows topped by a setback 15th floor.

The new design also gave the red-brick townhouses 12-paned windows and some of them have two stories of bay windows and some have stoops.

The townhouse designs are extremely compatible and very much in keeping with traditional Greenwich Village townhouses of the early 19th Century. The tower, however, relates more to the early 20th Century industrial architectural heritage of the area’s waterfront and is not as handsome as Gwathmey Siegel’s previous 15-story design that was more rectilinear and without arches.

In 2010, Mark Shuttleworth, a South African computer entrepreneur who was the second-ever space tourist, paid $31.5 million for a penthouse in the building, and in January 2012 three apartments on the 14th floor were combined and put on the market with an asking price of about $38.5 million for a total of 8 bedrooms and 9 and a half baths.