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\n Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Gabriel Sebastian\/Five 7 Media; Compass\/Niko Strbac\/Real Estate Production Network; Compass; Lena Yaremenko; Hause It\/Max Vasiluk; Edward Menashy\/Evan Joseph Studios\n <\/p>\n
More often than not, our listing stories are flights of fancy. And what\u2019s more fanciful than a 27-room maisonette with an invented Park Avenue address? Or maybe your tastes veer toward penthouse living \u2014 how about one with a deliciously long 160-foot terrace (useful as a dog run)? Readers also spent time with oddities that demanded explanation, from the bubblelike windows on a Lenox Hill townhouse to a 50-foot skybridge between towers on East 78th Street. We had some answers and lots of photos.<\/p>\n
A rare Manhattan skybridge divides the office and apartment of President Trump\u2019s diet guru. For what it\u2019s worth, the broker claims the bridge would make an ideal art gallery.<\/p>\n
Robert Lym Jr. had only built a few houses before settling in to work in the shadow of another architect: his boss, I. M. Pei. One house that survived is obsessively perfect and sits on an enviable chunk of Hamptons farmland.<\/p>\n
A renter and a single mother, Cantwell drifted around the Village on a writer\u2019s salary, depending on the kindness of landlords, before she bought her own place: the back of a former horse stable on Horatio Street. The massive great room is apparently perfect for parties.<\/p>\n
In a woodsy nook of Westchester, a 1963 home with gorgeous windows and charming throwbacks to that era, including a domed atrium, circular fireplace, and Japanese soaking tub. As my colleague Kim Velsey noted, the home was a quirk in the career of an architect whose firm was otherwise preoccupied with building skyscrapers in Manhattan.<\/p>\n
An effusively whimsical townhouse from an era when architects were starting to gain recognition as artists. This one has it all: miles of parquet and dark-wood cabinetry; cast iron on the fa\u00e7ade pressed into \u201cscrolled ferns and sunbursts and animal heads,\u201d and a loggia with fish-scale tiles where the current owners are known to put out a blow-up Halloween pumpkin.<\/p>\n
Apartment shopping in 2025 is nothing like it was in the 1980s, when you could ask a broker for a penthouse to rent and find yourself in the former apartment of hitmaker Al Nevins: a 57th Street prewar with a 160-foot-long terrace once used to entertain Carole King that\u2019s stuffed with fountains and statuary. Lately, it\u2019s been used as an ideal dog run for at least nine Cavalier King Charles spaniels.<\/p>\n
A 1972 house by R. Scott Bromley looks simple but contains umpteen moments of quiet luxury: a shower that sits beneath a skylight at the center of a bathroom or floorboards flowing diagonally through a living room toward a pool, which Bromley patterned at a 45-degree angle after discovering he preferred to walk barefoot across floorboards rather than along them.<\/p>\n
A townhouse on West 78th Street had the very good fortune to cross paths with two major New York architects early in their careers. The fa\u00e7ade is a delight of tiny details whipped up by the architect of the Grand Central Oyster Bar, and the interiors were renovated in the late 1960s by a Columbia professor \u201chacking out renovations on the side\u201d who is now known for the planetarium he built at the end of the block.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s probably not a coincidence that the home\u2019s construction coincides with the moon landing,\u201d writes my colleague Kim Velsey as she unwinds the tale of a Lenox Hill icon: the so-called Bubble House, with its odd bulging porthole windows. Put up by an obscure architect, the house went to a Park Avenue rabbi, who added an oversize hot tub.<\/p>\n
A good listing story allows us to snoop inside places that otherwise don\u2019t allow in the riff-raff, so it\u2019s only natural that\u00a0our most beloved listing story of the year was the yarn of a 27-room maisonette that\u2019s rarely photographed and technically isn\u2019t even on the market. (Its last owner, a Sackler, died this year, making it almost certain it will be sold soon.) Broker and writer Robert Khederian went deep on an apartment with a made-up address on Park Avenue, woodwork from Louis XIII\u2019s Ch\u00e2teau de Courcelles, and \u201cwhat might be the second-largest living room in city history.\u201d<\/p>\n
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