New York Living: Re-Inventing Home

Residences featured here show New York living of the moment: homes that defy traditional definition but which are nevertheless rooted in the historic ground of the city.

What does a home look like in twenty-first-century New York? While the city's name alone brings to mind very specific ideas--the Fifth Avenue penthouse, with its elegant moldings and crystal chandeliers; the SoHo loft, with its bright spaces and air of bohemian ease; the Brooklyn brownstone, with its fireplaces, parquet floors, and lush backyards--the truth is, New York today is much more than this, and the potential for variety in ways of living is, now more than ever, virtually limitless. As a result, in the twenty-first century, the combined design professions enjoy an unprecedented menu of prospective solutions, whether based upon respect for a classically inflected New York past, an emphatic denial of such a tradition, or, most often, some hybrid response that often yields the best innovation possible.

New York Living celebrates this vast potential while exploring contemporary apartments and town houses throughout the city, ranging beyond Manhattan into the outer boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx, and back to the center, Manhattan, which continues to climb ever higher in its reach toward the sky.

Paul Gunther is the executive director of the Gracie Mansion Conservancy, former president of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, and former vice president of institutional advancement and director of development at the New-York Historical Society.

Gay Giordano is a writer based in New York.