132 Perry Street #4A

The West Village keeps its scale on Perry Street, a cobblestoned block between Washington and Greenwich where the buildings rarely break above the cornice line. Number 132 is the exception that tries not to read as one. Lee Harris Pomeroy of LHP Architects designed an eleven-story mixed-use condominium here that did not clear the lot but wrapped an older structure already standing on it, turning that original building over to the new lobby and ground-floor retail. The record is firmer on the architect than on the date, which sources put anywhere from 1990 to 2000, so the honest version is this: Pomeroy drew the building, and the year is unsettled.

The move that made it belong was a matter of restraint at the base. Rather than start the new facade clean, the design clad the first two and a half floors in the red brick of the original structure, so the addition rises out of the block instead of landing on top of it. Above that brick base the building changes register: twelve-foot ceilings, large windows on all four sides, and elevators that open directly into the apartments. The lofts were conceived closer to studios than to conventional city rooms, with the kind of open volume that leaves the plan to the resident.

Unit 4A is offered for the first time, a large one-bedroom with one and a half baths carried at loft proportions under those twelve-foot ceilings. Windows reach across multiple sides, and a private terrace opens to north, east, and west, holding city views in three directions. It is listed for rent at 16,000 dollars a month by Noeline Cuker of Brown Harris Stevens. What the apartment offers is the quieter half of the West Village bargain: the openness of a loft and the outdoor air of a terrace, set behind a brick base old enough to disappear into the street.