151 East 78th Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 151 East 78th Street by Carter Horsley

This red-brick, mid-block apartment building at 151 East 78^th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues in Lenox Hill is an extremely elegant, Post-Modern, Neo-Classical building designed by Peter Pennoyer for Spruce Capital Partners.

The 16-story building has only 14 condominium apartments.

It was completed in 2015.

Bottom Line

A sedate, mid-block luxury apartment building that dares to be grand and challenge the best of the “pre-wars” with its detailing.

Description

The building has about 9 large decorative urns around its top parapets.

The building has an attractive but fairly conventional canopied entrance beneath an entrance broken pediment and an arched window and a two-story limestone base beneath a 9-story mid-section with two white window bays.

The building’s windows are multi-paned.

The building’s top, however, is quite elaborate and impressive.

The top floor, for instance, has three large oculi facing the street.

The 12^th floor has a deep terrace with two sets of multi-paned doors and an oval oculus. 

The 13^th floor has a large, white, west-facing bay window with a sloping masonry front façade and it overlooks the 12^th floor terrace and is topped with two trees.

The 14^th floor has a terrace two floors beneath the 16^th floor’s roof garden that has a masonry façade sloped in the opposite direction of the 13^th floor’s slope.

Much of its windowless, exposed west façade is nicely decorated with white stone “traceries” and the building has numerous cast-iron curved window railings.

Amenities

The building has a 24-hour doorman, a gym, storage, a bicycle room and a live-in resident manager.  It also has a library off the lobby that leads to a large private garden with “foliage tapestries and a fountain.

Apartments

Kitchens are by Smallbone of Devises and have coffered panel ceilings with ambient lighting. The painted exterior finish of the cabinetry conceals walnut interiors and cabinet hardware incudes Sugatsune pulls and Lefroy Brooks faucets.  Kitchens also have white quartz countertops and also refuse cabinets, cutlery and utensil drawers and pots and pans drawers.

Bathrooms have radiant heated marble floors, Sugar White marble countertops and Tea-for-Two marble-clad baths.

Entry galleries have barrel-vaulted ceilings.

Dining rooms have full-height French windows and chevron-pattern oak flooring.

Penthouse A is a five-bedroom, duplex unit on the 15^th and 16^th floors with 6,975 square feet and 1,958 square feet of external space and a wide entry gallery with two windows that leads to a 28-foot-long living room with a wood-burning fireplace and a 19-foot-wide terrace next to a 14-floot wide library with a bathroom and a 20-foot-long windowed dining room adjacent to a 18-foot-long kitchen and a 10-foot-long bedroom on the lower floor and four bedrooms and a laundry and a long gallery on the upper level.

Penthouse C is a 6-bedroom, triplex unit on the 12^th and 13^th floors  with  an long entry gallery that leads to a 28-foot-long living groom that opens onto a 31-foot-long terrace and also leads to a 22-foot-long library and a 22-foot-long dining room that is adjacent to a 19-foot-long enclosed, windowed kitchen and a 10-foot-long bedroom on the lower floor and five bedrooms on the upper floor with a 21-foot-master bedroom with a large bay window looking west over the lower floor’s terrace.

Penthouse B is a three-bedroom unit on the 14^th floor that has a very wide entry gallery with two windows that leads to a 15-foot-wide library with a semi-circular, 12-foot-wide terrace and a 25-foot-long living room adjacent to a 17-foot-long, windowed kitchen.

The duplex maisonette has a 16-foot-long den/bedroom that leads to a 39-foot-by-24-foot-terrace with a barbecue on the lower level and a 14-foot-long library/bedroom and four other bedrooms, and a long entry gallery leading to a 24-foot-wide living room that opens onto a 16-foot-long dining room with pocket sliding doors next to a 18-foot-long kitchen with pocket sliding doors.

History

Mr. Pennoyer, a grandson of J. P. Morgan, the art collector and financier, is the author of several monographs on the distinguished architectural firms of Cross & Cross, Whitney & Warren, Grosvernor Atterbury and Delano & Aldrich.

This was the former site of the Ackerman Institute.

According to a May 14, 2014 article in The New York Observer by Kim Velsey, Robert Schwartz and Joshua Crane are the co-founders of Spruce Capital and a co-investor in the project is “Carpathian billionaire Alexander Rovt.”  The article said that Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Crane had previously converted the buildings at 42 West 71^st Street and 116 Waverly and noted that this building’s site lies outside the Upper East Side Historic District boundaries.