7 East 17th Street

The building rose in 1903 inside the Ladies' Mile Historic District, an eight-story commercial loft building that runs through the block with doors on two streets (it answers to both 7 East 17th and 10 East 18th). The district, designated in 1989, preserves the blocks between Union Square and Madison Square where New York shopped from the 1860s through the First World War, and the building carried that working past until a 2007 conversion turned its floors into fourteen condominiums behind a fully restored landmark facade.

In 2019, Yoshihara McKee Architects, the Manhattan firm of Sandra McKee and Hiroki Yoshihara, gutted the third-floor south loft for an apparel designer, keeping only the four wide arched industrial windows and a run of exposed metal duct that recalls the building's commercial years. Published as Designer's Loft, the project took the Interiors Merit Award at the 2022 AIANY Design Awards, the only interiors merit the jury gave that year, for a scheme that folds a workroom and client showroom into a home without letting either read as an office.

The result is 2,800 square feet of deliberate calm: ceilings past twelve feet, wide Dinesen Douglas fir planks imported from Denmark, and a Molteni and DaDa kitchen with Sub-Zero, Miele, and Bosch behind custom cabinetry, its peninsula folded from quarter-inch stainless steel. Three bedrooms and two baths in the current configuration, with a marble main bath and a separate powder room, all a few doors off Fifth Avenue between Union Square and Madison Square Park.