535 Park Avenue

Park Avenue was still deciding what it wanted to be above 59th Street when a corporation calling itself Number 535 Park Avenue acquired the northeast corner of East 61st in early 1909. The buyers were the future residents. Instead of handing the site to a developer and signing leases, they capitalized the building themselves and hired Herbert Lucas to design it, which makes 535 Park one of the earliest cooperatives on the avenue built by its own shareholders. Lucas finished it in 1910: fifteen stories of red brick over a two-and-a-half-story rusticated base of white glazed terra cotta, with splayed lintels and half-oval wrought iron balconies he had already worked out at 24 Gramercy Park South.

The critics were not kind. A 1911 notice dismissed the glazed terra cotta of the lower floors as cheap finery set against the brick above it. A century on, that contrast is the thing that separates the building from the limestone fronts further up the avenue. The top floor was drawn as a residence and studio for Lydia Field Emmet, the society portraitist whose work now hangs in the White House and the Metropolitan Museum, an unusual brief for a Park Avenue corner and a fair indication of who the original shareholders were. The building sits just below the Upper East Side Historic District, whose Park Avenue stretch begins around 62nd Street, so it holds its prewar bearing without a landmark designation.

Residence 8AB is the interior designer Danielle Richter's own apartment, gut renovated with architect Michael Neumann and worked out around the night sky: curving lines, shimmering surfaces, and fixtures that read as constellations. The palette runs sepia, gray, aubergine and violet against burnished gold. Natural oak laid in a chevron pattern carries through all eight rooms, the plaster moldings were run on site, the hardware was cast in bronze to order, and the windows are triple-paned, which is how a corner apartment on Park Avenue gets quiet. Architectural Digest photographed it and settled on sexy and moody, which is closer to accurate than most listing copy manages.

Sixty nine feet of the apartment faces Park Avenue, with four exposures and ten-foot ceilings across 3,250 square feet. A private gallery opens onto a corner living room with an antique marble fireplace imported from London and a Juliet balcony over the avenue; the formal dining room beside it is framed in antique mirror under lighting by Anna Karlin. The kitchen holds a La Cornue induction range, a hammered German silver sink by De Giulio, and a single slab of Cosmopolitan quartzite for an island, lit by a Murano glass chandelier.

The primary suite takes an art nouveau marble fireplace from Paris, hand-painted wall coverings, vintage Emil Stejnar lighting, two full baths and two walk-in closets, and a dressing room finished with a black mother-of-pearl table; the north-facing bath sets a freestanding Waterworks tub beneath a custom Art Deco bas relief. A media room in ebonized oak, an office with a Nero marble bath, a laundry room, and a powder room papered in chinoiserie with a lilac marble sink complete the plan. Three bedrooms and four and a half baths, eight rooms in all.

Roughly twenty-six residences and two professional suites sit behind the canopy, with a full-time doorman, a live-in superintendent and several porters, a fifteenth-floor terrace looking toward Central Park, and private storage. The board allows pieds-a-terre, pets and purchases through trusts, permits financing up to 40 percent, and charges a 2 percent flip tax paid by the buyer. The shareholders who put up the money in 1909 would recognize the arrangement almost exactly.

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