337 Riverside Drive

The house faces west across Riverside Park, and the bay windows on the front carry the Hudson from the parlor floor up. Five stories and 10,000 square feet, with five bedrooms each behind its own bath, a separate basement apartment with its own entrance, and a 2,000-square-foot terrace on the roof.

It stands at the north end of its row, on the 106th Street corner, which is why the light arrives from two sides rather than one. The primary suite takes the river straight on, and from the roof the view runs up the Hudson to the George Washington Bridge. Inside, the plan is the one a house of this size was built to hold: a formal parlor, a library, a media room, a wine room and a temperature-controlled cellar, two renovated kitchens, a formal dining room off the main one, and seven wood-burning fireplaces spread through the floors.

In 1900 the developers Perez M. Stewart and H. Ives Smith commissioned Robert D. Kohn to design two mansions at the corner of Riverside Drive and 106th Street. The houses were finished two years later, in 1902. Kohn is better remembered now for the Society for Ethical Culture and the New York Evening Post Building, but the Riverside pair is the domestic end of the same hand.

The facade is the part worth standing in front of. Kohn used deep red brick laid in Flemish bond, with charred ends mixed in to break up the color and give the wall the appearance of age on the day it was finished. Heavy limestone enframements and quoins climb two full stories, swallowing the second- and third-floor openings, and intricately carved banded columns hold up the entrance portico at street level. A cast-iron fence ran around the property. The listing calls the columns sixteenth-century French in inspiration, which is a fair reading of what is carved there.

Number 337 sits inside the Riverside Drive-West 105th Street Historic District, designated in 1973, a small district of about thirty five-story houses. The run at 330-337 Riverside Drive is the stretch people mean when they say the Seven Beauties; this is the house at the end of it. Note that the listing's "Riverside Drive Historic District" is a loose name for it, and that the city's own lot record dates the building to 1902 rather than the 1899 in the listing's details table.

The actress Julia Marlowe bought the house in 1903 for $60,000, at the point in her career when she was the most celebrated Shakespearean on the American stage. After her it changed hands quickly: Lothar W. Faber, president of the Eberhard Faber Pencil Company, around 1911, then the John Wallace McKinnon family the same year, Charles B. Barkley in 1914, Perry J. Warren in the August of 1915.

In 1921 a corporation calling itself 337 Riverside Drive, Inc. took the house, and it was probably then that the words River Mansion were cut into the stone over the doorway. The name is younger than the building, and it was given to it by its landlord rather than its architect. Count Carl M. Armfelt and his bride were there in 1923. By 1934 it was letting furnished rooms, with the artist Michael de Santis and a Dr. Julian Spring among the tenants, and Louise Dickmann running it as a rooming house in 1952. A music school followed. The single-family house being sold now is the house coming back to what Kohn drew.

The renovation is recent and it is thorough. Two kitchens, each with JennAir's appliance suite, are arranged so the house can do a weeknight and a sixty-person party without the two using the same room. The primary bath has been taken back to the studs: a deep soaking tub, a separate glass-enclosed shower, river light. Elaborate moldings survive through the public rooms.

The basement apartment is the quiet argument in the offering. It has its own entrance from the street, which means the house can be a single family of five bedrooms with a self-contained flat underneath it: a guest floor, a staff flat, an office with its own door, or the thing that makes the carrying cost easier to look at. The city's records list the building as two residential units, which is what that arrangement looks like on paper.