Facing south on West 9th
The front of the house faces south over West 9th Street, between Fifth Avenue and Sixth, and the parlor windows are tall enough to take all of it. Behind the house, two tiers of garden by Miranda Brooks: a dining terrace, then ground that lifts into boxwood columns standing in white gravel, fencing woven out of hazel, and Judas trees pleached flat that come into pink flower each spring.
The Landmarks Preservation Commission's 1969 designation report reads the house as one of three. Nos. 55, 57 and 59 were built in 1839 and 1840 by James Harriot, a mason and builder at 4 Eighth Avenue who was working this part of Greenwich Village hard in those years. The report holds No. 55 as well preserved as its neighbour, and notes the small cornices above its window lintels, the smooth-stuccoed basement, and a roof cornice that belongs to the Italianate period rather than to Harriot.
Job 120815074
The restoration is in the city's own file under one number. Job 120815074 was pre-filed on September 2, 2011, approved that November and signed off on May 27, 2020: interior renovation throughout and a rear extension at the basement of a one-family dwelling, landmarked, architect of record Jean-Gabriel Neukomm. The owner named on the filing was the art director Fabien Baron, who had taken the deed from the wine writer Victor Hazan three months earlier. Francois Halard photographed the result for WSJ Magazine in March 2018.
On the street side Neukomm kept the cornice line and the brick, repointed, and had the stoop and the window surrounds recreated. The lot measures 22.17 feet across and 92.25 feet deep in the city's lot record, which is where the 22 foot front comes from.
Inside, and before
The parlor level carries the living room and the library, which open into one another for one long room or stay two, with a wood-burning fireplace under a carved Louis XVI mantel and a reading room that gives onto the terrace above the garden. The top floor is the primary suite and nothing else: a gas fireplace in the bedroom, a skylit marble bathroom worked up from Paul Dupre-Lafon's interiors, two fitted closets. Four more bedrooms sit below, two large and two small on the third floor and one more at the garden level. In the kitchen a 30 foot wall of full-height cabinetry absorbs all the storage, which is what lets the wall opposite stay a single unbroken sweep of Calacatta gold; the Lacanche range, enamel over stainless steel, is at the center of it.
The deed trail is short. First Presbyterian Church held the house until 1991, when it went to Nicola Kotsoni and Steve Tzolis, the restaurateurs behind Il Cantinori and Periyali. Victor Hazan took it in March 1995 and kept it sixteen years. Harriot's three houses are all still standing, in the order he built them.
