The High Life

Pool with a view...I looked at a new job for HWandV, on Broadway and East 4th. It's three floors, top of building, three garden spaces, plus this pool which is going to be resurfaced in...mother of pearl. I haven't met the client yet, just his agent, but this will be his East Coast pad - he's based in LA, and I suspect we're talking Movies. I look forward to it. I've actually been to this place before, for a party years ago, with Mr Tracey Ryans, legendary mover and shaker and transient friend. Now it's going to be gutted and redone, and I have to figure out what one earth to do with, for example, the built-in brick (eugh) planters on the second level (which is on the tenth floor), with massive, fullgrown trees, the fake lawn and the otherwise oddly suburban (read screamin' heebie jeebies) feel, and the completely abandoned roof, which does, though, have a very nice herringboned stone floor.

Below: see the above picture and skip over the lush garden on a roof in the middle of the view; in the faaaar left of the view is another roof garden, on the old Karl Fischer Building. That's ours, too. In fact the photo of me laying the little lawn on one of the previous posts, is in that garden, designed for the exclusive use of the two little Yorky terriers that share the house.

Now behind the Karl Fischer Building and just visible as blue glass way on the left of the second pool picture, is the Gwathmey Siegel-designed No. 1 Astor Place. Two years ago I was asked to do a freelance design for one of its two lower terraces for a young couple moving in. I gave them two designs, which they paid for, and then I was fired, during a 40 minute phonecall from the Missus, for forgetting twice in a row to cc her on an email. Hm.

This week, HWandV is contacted by a frustrated general contractor who says that the company hired to install the garden on this terrace in that building for this couple has been fired, that work has ground to a halt. And would we please fix it. I look at the design with Bill. Looks familiar! Funny. Anyway, I told Bill he'd better tell the GC the whole story and 'fess up that I am very much associated with HWandV (the couple knew this but may have forgotten). Apparently no one has a problem with it. Small, elevated world.

No, no, I'm staying well out of it. That would be a bit too weird, even for me.