799 Greenwich Street, 3N

799 Greenwich Street went up in 1900 and holds twelve apartments across six stories. Unit 3N is on the third floor and runs fifteen hundred square feet. It is a co-op loft, and it reads the way that label suggests, a floor plate first and rooms second. Twelve apartments over six floors is a small count, and that is the shape of the building rather than a line on an amenity list.

Four rooms sit on that floor plate, two of them bedrooms, with one bath. Eleven oversized windows open across three exposures, and that is the argument for the apartment. Daylight arriving from three sides runs the length of a day instead of one hour of it, and light is the single element of a home that no renovation installs afterward. A buyer can move a wall, redraw a kitchen, rebuild a bath. Nobody adds an exposure. Underfoot there are hardwood floors, and overhead the volume and character that make a downtown loft read as a loft rather than as a large apartment.

Nothing in 3N has been finished to somebody else's taste, and that is the offer rather than an oversight. The plan is waiting to be reimagined by whoever takes it, with none of a previous owner's decisions to undo first. Roof rights come with the apartment. The building carries a roof deck and storage of its own. Outside the door the A, C, E and L at Eighth Avenue sit about a quarter mile off, the 1 at Christopher Street runs roughly the same distance, and the Hudson is a short walk in the other direction. That is the West Village trade the address makes: a small prewar building on Greenwich Street, close enough to the trains and the river that neither one is a project to reach.