Living Large, Living Jade: State-of-the-Art Design on the West Side
On a gritty block of West 19th Street sits a portal to another world. Well, at least another lifestyle. The disco ball hanging above the doorman gives it all away: This is the Jade, a converted residential building hiding 57 condos marketed to those who want to be Jade Jagger — or to live like her.
The who’s who of this building reads like a long list of movie credits, but it’s ultimately quite simple: This building is all about Ms. Jagger, who, in addition to being rock royalty, is now a brand. The central marketing idea is that this residence allows people to live her brand. Or as the promotional brochure urges in languid, curvaceous script: “Live Jade Jagger Style.”
Ms. Jagger has made a career for herself as a designer of jewelry and other items. For this project, she and her design partner, Tom Bartlett, teamed up with an international design firm, Yoo, run by John Hitchcox and Philippe Stark. The architecture firm Perkins Eastman turned the vision into reality, and the Copper Group constructed the building. The campaign and strategy to sell the apartments — ranging in price from $500,000 for a small studio to $3.7 million for a three-bedroom penthouse duplex — was developed by Michael Shvo of the real estate marketing firm Shvo (which also brought Armani to 20 Pine St.). In most circumstances, the who-did-what of a building is not exactly a selling point. Here, the enterprise is so aggressive in carving out new territory that the players do matter.
In pure design terms, the Jade is hard to resist. The model apartment has a loft feel, with 13-foot ceilings, blond wood floors, and furniture selected by the collaboration known as Jade Jagger for Yoo. The central allure is the supremely modern “pod,” a tall, shiny square that sits in the middle of the apartment and contains life’s necessities: kitchen, bathroom, closets, and washer and dryer. The pod can be closed so that all of these inconvenient truths are smoothly hidden from view.
As difficult as it may be to imagine having a giant metal box in the middle of your place, the pod is nifty. “If you look around nationally or internationally, this is a small project, but it’s revolutionary,” the design principal of Perkins Eastman, Eran Chen, said.
He does acknowledge that the pod is not for everyone. “We wouldn’t design apartments like that on the Upper West Side,” Mr. Chen said. “This is for a user who is budget conscious, but also very design conscious — who is not necessarily into huge kitchens with islands.”
Indeed, though the kitchen comes with top-quality appliances, it is typically Manhattan: miniscule. This is a space for chopping some parsley onto your take-out entrées. “It’s very comparable to studios and one-bedrooms,” he said. “It’s not oversized, but its not undersized.”
