The round shape is beautiful to look at, but this spread offers much more. I love the floor to ceiling windows that envelope you in nature and light. The core of the home and its central spiral staircase are stationary; the rest of the house spins. It takes about 48 minutes for one complete rotation, so imagine stepping off the stairs and walking directly into your bedroom one day and into your living room the next. The same variety applies to the outdoors views. Start breakfast overlooking a massive pond and finish breakfast overlooking a serene garden. The round motif continues throughout the house, from the fireplace to the limestone sink in the powder room. There are 3 bedrooms and 2 ½ baths. It sits on 4 acres and has a guest-house and an inground pool. The house is made of steel, glass and cedar shingles. Designed by famed architect Richard T. Foster in 1968 (as a collaboration with Philip Johnson), the home is on the market right now with an asking price of $1,750,000.00.

Well, apparently, that’s O.K. According to city records, brokerage baron Charles Schwab and his wife, Helen, have sold their petite penthouse on the building’s 15th floor to Miriam (Mimi) Haas, Levi-Strauss executive Peter Haas’ widow and current chairwoman of the company, for $12.5 million.

One may ask why Mr. and Mrs. Schwab would sell hallowed square footage in the Gold Coast beauty, referred to by many as the superlative residential building in Manhattan. Well, because they currently own both the penthouse upstairs and the significantly larger layout on the ninth floor. In trend with traveling south for the winter, Mr. and Mrs. Schwab scooped up that apartment—six floors south of their winter abode—in 2007. Clearly, the view from the top wasn’t worth the small square footage because the couple famously paid $27.7 million for the ninth-floor apartment (it was listed for $16.5 million).

And with good reason. Brown Harris Stevens broker, Kathryn Steinberg, who has worked extensively in the building but was not involved in this deal, told The Observer, “It’s the nicest building in New York. The size and scale of the rooms are perfect.” Sotheby’s Roger Erickson, who we presume brokered the deal, considering he had the listing, albeit briefly, has said of the creme de Candela’s creme,”It’s as if it were created by someone in heaven who knows exactly how we should live.”

Last September, The Observer reported the Schwabs’ ghost-like listing of the petite affair on the 15th floor. Listed with Mr. Erickson for $14 million, it remained on the market but a New York minute before being taken “permanently off the market,” according to a broker’s database. The phantom listing was not, despite appearances, a chimeric event but rather a rare reminiscence of pre-Lehman zest.

Ms. Haas, who, like the Schwabs, is San Francisco–based, made an offer on the apartment before any other brokers had a chance at it. One broker told The Observer, “The listing was down before anyone had a chance to make an appointment to show it.”

“That fireplace was in use most of the year,” said Ms. Berman, an architect who lived in the apartment in the early 1990s. “For three years I had quarter cords of wood delivered to my doorstep.”

But in 2002, when she moved with a fellow architect named Bradley Horn to an 1898 town house in the Sugar Hill Historic District of Harlem, she gave her heart to another fireplace, one that sat buried in the wall in the front parlor and hadn’t worked for seven decades.

Ms. Berman didn’t care. She discovered a creamy cast-stone mantel at a showroom closeout sale, surrounded the hearth with a toasty slab of Breccia Imperiale marble, and never looked back.

“I don’t miss the fire,” Ms. Berman said. “And I love the look of the surround. It really anchors a room and give it focus.”

When it comes to the attractions of a particular house or apartment, there’s little mystery as to why space-starved New Yorkers are drawn to generous square footage, high ceilings and jaw-dropping views.

But over time, residents find less-obvious design elements unexpectedly alluring, not only faux fireplaces but also weirdly shaped alcoves, a decommissioned dumbwaiter, Juliet balconies, claw-foot bathtubs, minuscule shelves carved into staircases, transoms atop doors, brass keyholes and vintage radiators. The list includes even more unlikely details, among them servants’ buttons, speaking tubes, original metal thermostats and shaving closets. (Most people don’t even know what a shaving closet is: a shallow alcove with a sink just large enough for a man to trim his whiskers.)

These mundane grace notes, which may seem to have little purpose beyond collecting dust, are sometimes the very things residents single out to explain why they are drawn to a particular space. On occasion, these homely accents even prove to be the selling point when it comes to closing a deal.

See full article at the NY Times

The Armory show has been New York’s most prominent gathering on the international contemporary art circuit for nine years running. It is not to be missed.