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Occupancy began about a month ago at the Cielo, a 27-story condominium apartment building at 450 East 83rd Street on the southwest corner at York Avenue.

The building has 128 units ranging in size from 626-square-foot studios to 3,221-square-foot three-bedroom apartments that were initially priced from about $700,000 to $5 million.

Most of the apartments have been sold, several being combined to make larger units.

Perkins Eastman is the architect and the J. D. Carlisle Development Corporation, of which Jules Demchick is the principal, is the developer.

The building's tower is setback on a five-story base and it has many corner windows and its facades' verticality is highlighted by piers.

The building has a large lobby with paintings by Betsy Eby commissioned by the building's interior designer, Philip Koether, and buyers were given free memberships to the Whitney Museum of American Art. The building's marketing also highlighted its "art concierge."

Last year, Mr. Demchick extended the building's "artistic purview across 83rd Street by commissioning Richard Haas, the famous photorealist muralist of urban scenes, to create a 77-foot-wide trompe l'oeil mural on the graffiti-laden wall of a tenement building.

Mr. Demchick made an agreement with George Papoutsis, the owned of the tenement building to permit the mural, which was completed last year at an estimated cost of about $200,000.

The mural consists of a painted glockenspiel, or animated clock, flanked by New York City police officers. The glockenspiel was intended as a nostalgic flourish to the Germanic history of the Yorkville neighborhood.

Mr. Haas is perhaps best known for his mural of the original New York Times Building at the south end of Times Square that was painted across 42nd Street from that building that had undergone several drastic facade transformations. That mural was lost when that site was redeveloped for an office tower.

The light-colored building has a fitness center, a garage, a children's playroom, a stroller room, a bicycle room and about 4,000 square feet of medical office space.

Apartments have Bulthaup kitchens with Pietra Cardosa countertops and SubZero, Wolf and Miele appliances. Bathrooms have Villefort limestone floors and custom ebonized black walnut cabinetry and double Kohler sinks with Waterworks fixtures.

The 307-foot-tall building is three blocks south of the 86th Street crosstown bus and one block west of Carl Schurz Park.

Other projects by J. D. Carlisle include Morton Square in the West Village and the Wellesley on East 72nd Street.
Architecture Critic Carter Horsley Since 1997, Carter B. Horsley has been the editorial director of CityRealty. He began his journalistic career at The New York Times in 1961 where he spent 26 years as a reporter specializing in real estate & architectural news. In 1987, he became the architecture critic and real estate editor of The New York Post.