A loft building of 1900
Ninety Prince Street is a small pre-war building of 1900, eight floors and thirteen apartments in the middle of the SoHo cast-iron district. The penthouse sits at the top of it, and almost nothing about the interior follows from the address.
The argument with the grid
Thomas Leeser, of Leeser Architecture, designed the apartment against the convention that a luxury interior is a set of matched surfaces. Marble slabs are placed as they came, each unlike the last in shape, tone and finish, and set beside exposed brick, cinderblock and petrified wood. The architect has described the result as contradiction held in harmony rather than concealed, which is a fair account of what the rooms do.
Thirty feet of light
The main living volume rises close to thirty feet beneath a monumental skylight, on floors of seventeenth-century French oak, with a wood-burning fireplace anchoring the low end of the room. Two bedrooms and two baths sit off it, one of them holding a Belgian clay soaking tub.
The painted roof
Two terraces run to more than a thousand square feet across two levels, facing north, west and south. Their surface is a hand-painted three-dimensional tessellation, a black and white field that reads as depth from the apartment and as pattern from the buildings above it.
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