27 Great Jones Street

Twenty seven Great Jones Street was the first building in what is now the NoHo Historic District Extension put up as a store and loft rather than converted into one. Louis Burger designed it for Frederick A. Vilmar and it went up between 1868 and 1870, a cast iron and marble front in the Italianate palazzo manner that the A. T. Stewart store had made the language of commercial New York two decades earlier.

Its tenants read as a century of downtown in miniature. William Wood and Company, a publishing house founded in 1804 that had narrowed to medical books by 1863, took the building within two years of its completion and stayed ten, and the volumes it printed carried this address on their title pages. A coffin manufacturer followed in the 1890s. By the late 1920s the floors held paper box, paper cup and twine firms, and a ventilation and electrical company was still here around 1970. In 1967 openings were cut through to 29 Great Jones Street next door, Charles W. Clinton's brick and terra cotta loft of 1891, and the two have worked as one building since. A two story penthouse went on at the end of the 1990s with the conversion to condominium.

Two bedrooms and two baths across 2,041 square feet, with a third flexible room for an office or guests. Over twelve and a half foot ceilings, exposed wood beams, a full wall of original brick, and wide plank floors throughout. A wood burning fireplace sits between built in shelving in the great room, under oversized double hung windows, with the scale to keep living and dining apart. The kitchen runs white shaker cabinetry, quartz counters and a six burner range with a double oven under a stainless hood, open to the dining end.

The primary suite takes a walk in closet into a bedroom with a private balcony, and an en suite bath with a double vanity, a glass shower and a separate soaking tub in matching marble. Off that bedroom, a private terrace in teak runs the width of the apartment inside the building's cast iron surround, wide enough for more than one seating area, looking onto the brick rears of the block and a wooden water tower above them.