137-141 Duane Street

The penthouse at 137 Duane Street has about 5,000 square feet inside and 7,200 outside, and every primary room opens onto a terrace. Above it the roof is planted as a meadow of native grasses, with a stainless steel hot tub set into the deck and One World Trade Center standing over it.

The plan is built around a glazed courtyard in the middle of the apartment. A spiral stair climbs out of it to the roof inside a cocoon of laser-cut, mirror-polished stainless steel, fabricated in Italy by Marzorati Ronchetti. The living and dining room, 30 feet long with a wood-burning fireplace, runs along one side of the courtyard, and two islands of Italian basalt make the kitchen at its end.

The renovation is the work of the architect Steven Blatz with Antonio Pio Saracino, whose studio conceived the stair, and of the landscape architects HMWhite, who planted the roofs. Interior Design named it Best of the Year for a large apartment in 2013; it went on to a Chicago Athenaeum American Architecture Award in 2014 and an ASLA New York Honor Award in 2015.

Inside, the walls are hand-made zinc and hand-rubbed American walnut, the floors wide-plank European oak from LV Wood over radiant heat, and the windows oversized Hope's steel. The baths are Blue de Savoie stone. The primary bath sets its soaking tub and shower against a pane of glass, with bamboo and an Ipe-wood treillage on the other side. There are four bedrooms, convertible to five, a den with a bar, a screening room, and a primary bedroom with its own fireplace and terrace.

Horace H. Day, the rubber goods manufacturer who lost a famous patent case to Charles Goodyear, built the store and loft building here in 1863 and 1864. It runs through the block to Thomas Street, where its Gothic Revival cast-iron front survives substantially intact. The Diamond Shoe Corporation bought it in 1926 and had Irving M. Fenichel join it to its neighbor, raising the floors at No. 137 and adding a fifth story; the panel over the entrance reads Diamond Building.

It sits in the Tribeca South Historic District, moments from Duane Park, and is now a condominium of nineteen residences with keyed elevator access and a live-in super.