It’s the stuff of New York real estate fairy tales. The owners of the apartment next to yours, the one with the highly covetable views you’ve been lusting after for years, come to you because they want to sell, and they’d like to give you right of first refusal.
You strike a deal, and, the next thing you know—well, the next thing after the lengthy planning process, bureaucratic board approvals, endless permitting, and months and months and months of construction dust and punch-list punching—you’re living in the home of your dreams, with the skyline vistas to prove it. Pure fantasy? Not if you’re arts marketing entrepreneur turned interior designer Erik Gensler.
Shop out the look of the house here⤵
Gensler and his husband lucked into just such a situation not so long ago, and it allowed them to expand their home, on the 15th floor of a landmarked late-1920s Art Deco building in New York’s West Village, into the mirror-image apartment next door. Now, the couple can hardly stop staring at the lights of the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings that twinkle at them nightly from their dining and living rooms.
As Gensler sees it, this “once upon a time” story couldn’t have had better timing. “I had just stepped away from my digital marketing business, and had started an interiors firm, mainly working with friends. I saw this apartment as an opportunity to put my design skills and education on view without a client,” the designer and AD PRO Directory member says, explaining that since finishing the space, his home has become something of a calling card, and a touchstone. Now, when he works with clients, “We often find ourselves referencing things here.”
