partying pair purchased at 10 Leonard Street / prefer kitchen or skylights?

embracing loft diversity
The Manhattan loft building at 10 Leonard Street has only 16 units, but two of them sold this month. Though both are said to be about 1,700 sq ft and are newly renovated, they are different from each other in ways that warm my Manhattan loft snob’s heart. The listing histories are  eerily parallel, so anyone interested in one is very likely to have seen the other. But I suspect that they appealed to buyers for very different reasons.

one way to party
One of the competing Manhattan lofts is #2S, with “1,700 sq ft”, a laundry room that was “redesigned to double as a staging area for catering and entertaining needs” and a kitchen that is so enthusiastically babbled that the word “massive” appears twice:

Massive, newly renovated chef’s kitchen with a stainless steel Wolf six-burner plus griddle range and double oven. Seamless Corian countertops, stainless steel backsplash throughout, oak bottom cabinetry and massive amounts of storage in the ten lacquer cabinets. Sub-Zero double-wide all stainless steel refrigerator and stainless steel super-sized wine cooler with storage count of 140 bottles.

The footprint is unusual. The kitchen extends from the living space lengthwise, while the master suite extends from the living space width-wise. I will confess to not being able to reconcile the floor plan and the photos for #2S. Note the main photo is clearly the living room (a larger version appears on the broker website) with two exposures, but that the floor plan shows the living room with only one exposure. The glory of the floor plan is that massive kitchen with its massive storage. The 5th photo (the kitchen, lengthwise) gives a great perspective on how long “massive” can be. If the floor plan scale is anywhere close to reality, the kitchen is longer than any other room in the loft.

With that kitchen and a huge (dare I say, massive) laundry room that can double as an entertaining staging area, this space was clearly designed to party! I wonder if the sellers outgrew the 2-bedroom layout or outgrew the party! lifestyle, as they were only there 3 years before starting to re-sell, during some of that time the space was being renovated.

They bought it September 27, 2007 for $1.66mm. Based on the former listing description and only surviving photo (with no floor plan, darn it), they may not have done much to the structure (it already boasted a “large” kitchen and a “very large room” off the kitchen) but they may have exposed the brick walls. (Contra StreetEasy, our data-base shows that this loft was marketed for only two weeks in October 2006 at $1.575mm before going “temporarily off the market”, and I see no reactivated listing before it sold 11 months later at $1.66mm.) As the former layout claims 2 bedrooms and 2 baths, I suspect the layout hardly changed from 2006 to 2010. (Where else would you put a second bedroom??) So my quibble may not be with the recent sellers, although they chose not to fix the fact that both bathrooms are en suite, which is clearly a choice that could have been made different, given that massive laundry room off the kitchen. But I quibble….

upstairs is a very different party experience
Coincidences abound with the simultaneous marketing, and eerily parallel histories of #2S and #7N:

The babble for #7N sounds similar to #2S, but the floor plans tell a different story. #7N is described no less enthusiastically than #2S:

Authentic TOP floor, three bedroom/ two bath loft with wonderful original building details is newly renovated and features exposed brick, walnut floors, plus 4 SKYLIGHTS. A bright, modern kitchen with top appliances is open to the living/dining area and has beautiful wood and steel accents. The master suite with large WIC and a windowed master bath (big enough to have a party in), is nicely separated from the secondary bedrooms and bath.

#7N has a more conventional Manhattan loft footprint (very roughly square) with two exposures that permit the 2 ‘extra’ bedrooms. I bet that the skylights give this a very different feel from #2S, and the arched windows add an old school loft element missing on the lower floor. Both bathroom are large, and both have windows, but the babble invites the 7th floor party to the master bath. Personally, I’d rather party in the #2S kitchen and laundry room than in the #7N master bath.

same same, though different
Look again at the listing histories table above. The Market valued these two newly renovated spaces essentially the same, with the lower floor 2-bedroom getting $1.96mm while the sky-lit 3-bedroom got $2mm. If you needed 3 bedrooms, you were not going to get it on the second floor, but if you really wanted to party your guests would have more room on the second floor than in the master bath on 7.

Gotta love The Market, and the diversity of Manhattan lofts.

© Sandy Mattingly 2011