Last week Your Mama discussed a New York City doo-plex co-operative that filthy rich financier Robert Hurst recently hoisted on the market with a toe curling $29,000,000 asking price. If the children will recall, Mister Hurst's apartment encompasses two entire floors of an unusually slim pre-war building on Fifth Avenue and has stellar views of Central Park.The children may also recall that we whined and went on at length about a few elements of the floor plan that gave Your Mama a serious case of the real estate agita. In the interest of settling our stomach and soothing our order craving brain thought we'd spend some time working out the wonkiness of the floor plan.
What we have above, puppies, is the existing floor plan on the left and Your Mama's proposed plan to the right. The children will want to click on the image in order to view the plan(s) at a larger size.
Your Mama changed next to nothing on the first floor of the doo-plex. This twenty-some million dollar doo-plex is, for all intents and purposes, a one room wide railroad flat and to divide any of the rooms would only accentuate the narrow-ness of the apartment. Besides, we rather like the vast entrance gallery even if it is a sea of marble floored wasted space and we saw no good reason(s) to screw with the decent proportions of either the living or the dining room.
Back in the kitchen, Your Mama made a couple of minor adjustments. On the existing plan, a peninsula counter separates the kitchen and the breakfast area. It is our opinion that the space works better without that peninsula sticking out into the room. If more counter space is required by Connie the Cook, we'd suggest extending the work island a foot or two. We also added a vegetable sink to the island.
After a consult with our imperious house gurl Svetlana, Your Mama realized the laundry facilities, located just off the breakfast area, are very poorly situated in relation to the rest of the apartment. Imagine the time and effort required to haul the sheets and towels down from the upstairs bedrooms not to mention the ugliness of dragging all the dirty linens across the grand entrance galley, through the dining room and then wind one's way through the butler's pantry and kitchen.
A better solution would be to move the machines upstairs and into one of the walk in closets that line the hallway. However, given that laundry machines must vent to the exterior of a building and we don't know if it's possible to vent the machines from anywhere on the second floor–we are not, after all, an architect or engineer with any intimate knowledge of this building–we left them in their existing location. We do imagine, in our booze baked mind, that if the washer and dryer must stay where they are we'd replace the standard side-by-side machines with a stackable set in order to provide Lucinda the Laundress with a smidge of counter top on which she can fold the owner's undergarments.
The layout of second floor of the apartment makes Your Mama all kinds of crazy and requires a radical but not particularly complicated rearrangement of rooms in order to create a more sensible and harmonious flow. First, we widened the stair landing to a more graceful width making it feel more its own space that just an extension of the very long hallway. The bigger issue is, however, the erroneous location of the library and the master bedroom in the existing plan.
We're sure some will vociferously disagree, but one of Your Mama's many floor plan pet peeves is when the most prime real estate in an apartment or home is reserved for the master bedroom. As far as we're concerned, a view such as the one from Mister Hurst's apartment is, quite simply, wasted on the master bedroom. We can understand the logic: The person who pays the bills deserves to retain some of the most prime real estate as a private sanctuary for themselves and themselves alone. However, in the case of Mister Hurst's doo-plex, there are only two direct exposures to Central Park, and one is given over entirely to the master bedroom, a room in which far more time is spent sleeping, dressing, bathing and/or fornicating and not enjoying the view.
The location of the library in the existing plan also makes Your Mama go a bit berserk. The library, a fah-fah-fancy term for a family room in this case, is stuck in the back of the apartment and couldn't be farther from the delicious view of Central Park. Even worse–and a real damn high crime of space planning in our book–is that access to the library in the existing plan is only through a small home gym. The inelegance and indignity of having to pinch past an elliptical machine and a Soloflex in order to get to the library in a $29,000,000 apartment is enough to make Your Mama need a big ol' fat nerve pill.
And too, the library–where rich people who occupy posh pre-war apartments on the Upper East Side often keep the boob-toob–is a semi-public room in which owners might occasionally want to entertain informal guests and friends. Who wants to invite a guest over for movie night or a Real Housewives of New York City marathon on the Bravo and then ask them to pass through an armpit stinky room filled with scary looking contraptions designed to pretzel and torture a body into taut submission? No one, that's who.
To fix that very serious floor plan problem, Your Mama swapped the library at the back and the master bedroom at the front. Not only is the library in the new plan easily accessible through the newly expanded stair landing and generously sized ante room with wet bar, but the best view in the entire apartment can now be enjoyed from the room that is, quite likely, the most frequently used. The fireplace is a bonus. We're sure some folks think it's 14 kinds of romantic to have a fireplace in the master bedroom, but we'd bet money and our long bodied bitches Linda and Beverly that a fireplace in a library gets far more use than a fireplace in the master bedroom. Again, one can't enjoy a fire in the fireplace iffin yer asleep. Besides it's damn dangerous to leave a fire running when drifting off to slumber.
Some might say that moving the master bedroom to the rear of the apartment is like asking the owner to step to the back of the bus. We see things differently. The location of the master suite in the proposed plan creates a cocoon of privacy from the rest of the apartment, the guest bedrooms in particular.
We replaced the gymnasium in the existing floor plan with a pass-through dressing room surrounded with built-in cabinetry and enclosed wardrobes. While Your Mama would never dream of having a fitness room in our house, we kept with the existing program and moved the gym equipment to a windowed room carved from the square footage of the apartment's smallest bedroom. The small bedroom and an en-suite pooper replaces the dressing room and master pooper in the existing plan.
We sectioned the east end of the master bedroom off to make a proper if simple master pooper and we consciously retained the tight terliting facilities in the hallway, adding a doorway in the hallway so that the entire ass end of the apartment can be used as a master suite with bedroom, dressing room, gym and two poopers. The doorway from the hallway to the dressing room was retained so that guests or other family members might also have access to the gym without penetrating or passing through the inner sanctum of the master bedroom.
We are braced for criticisms. Have at it.
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