Space-The Final Frontier

I had a big birthday last week, and big birthdays make you think. In addition to the larger questions, I have also been contemplating my love affair with living space, and how that fascination with the ways space is organized and deployed has informed my real estate career. Furthermore, I think the way we structure our living spaces can offer substantial insight into what we value and believe to be important.

 

I grew up in one of those big, full floor, Upper East Side apartments designed by J.E.R.Carpenter. The staff rooms were inhabited by the staff. The kids were, mostly, supposed to stay out of the kitchen. Breakfast, lunch (on the rare occasions we were home for lunch), and dinner were eaten in the dining room. My parents entertained frequently, so the living room, with its extremely formal furniture, was often in use. When there were no guests, or only a couple of them, they sat in the library. We kids mostly stayed in our rooms, which we shared with a sibling. No one in the family had his or her own bathroom, and there was no powder room; it was a regular occurrence that some middle aged guy would walk through my room while I was doing my homework to use the bathroom. There was no family room-had they even been thought of in the 50s? I think life had changed little, at least for our family, since the time the building was built in 1916.

 

Then came the 60s! The era when children were to be seen but not heard ended; my brothers and I talked, talked, talked from morning till night. And where did we subject my increasingly frazzled mother to the diatribes? The kitchen-newly liberated from its function as a place for the staff (most of whom had retired)! We sat in the kitchen, drinking endless cups of tea while deconstructing the old world order. That was the time when the EIK entered the Manhattan acronymic lexicon as a place for the FAMILY to eat. The grand old apartments were reconceived by a new generation of parents who actually wanted to interact with their kids. And suddenly these kids had needs: each of them needed a bathroom. They needed walk in closets (for what? I had a blazer, a winter jacket, a summer jacket, and a suit. I did not need to walk into anything to find THEM.)

 

During the 50s, apartment house architecture was pretty much at a nadir. White brick was ubiquitous, as was “efficiency.” Apartments were tight: low ceilings, smallish rooms and bathrooms, minimal foyer and hallway space. The 60s weren’t much better, and then in the 70s the city was broke, nearly went into bankruptcy, and there was a big overstock of housing no one wanted to buy or rent, since the common perception was that the city was dying. However, it didn’t die, and in the 80s apartment house construction came back, And, little by little, the changed priorities which I had dimly begun to perceive sitting around the kitchen table as a teenager became architecturally codified. Foyers came back in the new condos of the 80s and 90s, as a symbol of grace and a recognition of the importance of a sense of entry. Every bedroom got a bathroom, and master bathrooms became larger and more opulent, a reflection of the new consumer’s taste for high end materials and a sense of pampering. Bedrooms remained small however-a place to sleep. The locus of family life (which I would have to say was probably the dining room when I was growing up) became the kitchen. Being a good cook became important, even if you HAD a cook. And even if you DIDN’T cook, you still had to have a fancy kitchen with expensive name brand appliances.  A family room, perhaps made out of those now obsolete maids’ rooms off the kitchen or the increasingly obsolete dining room, was the new place to hang out and watch TV.

 

The high end new condos of today try to emulate the prewar ideal in an updated manner. Most of them still have small secondary bedrooms, but each one has a bath. There is ALWAYS a powder room. Master baths are huge marble clad affairs, often putting to relative shame the bedrooms which they serve. Kitchens are large and as tricked out as possible with name brands: Gaggenau cooktop, Miele dishwasher, SubZero fridge. There may be a servant’s room, rarely two, never more. These homes are clearly designed for a far more democratic life than that which I lived as a child. Today, everyone hangs out together. The stratification of my life as a child was reflected in the architecture we inhabited: the service area of the apartment reserved for servants, the bedroom wing where most of the lives of the children took place, and the grand public spaces designed for the adults. Luxury today tends to be reflected less in room size (although there are some big big living rooms in some of the new condos) or the way functions are divided. Open, loft like spaces, in which everyone is happily interacting with everyone else, are very popular. High end finishes, multiple bathrooms, spacious kitchens and family rooms-these are the markers for today’s affluent but far more casual user.

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