Real Estate

One of a Kind

CLASSIC: Richard Kind and his wife, Dana, own a sprawling Emery Roth co-op.

CLASSIC: Richard Kind and his wife, Dana, own a sprawling Emery Roth co-op. (Zandy Mangold)

CLASSIC: Richard Kind and his wife, Dana, own a sprawling Emery Roth co-op. (Zandy Mangold)

OPEN WIDE: After falling in love with this three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment at a 2009 open house, Kind purchased it and then knocked out walls that separated the kitchen from the dining room and the living room. (Zandy Mangold)

The kitchen (Zandy Mangold)

Toby, the hypoallergenic cat (Zandy Mangold)

Back in 1997, Richard Kind, now co-starring in Clifford Odets’ “The Big Knife” at the American Airlines Theatre, had a plan. He was going to propose to his then-girlfriend Dana Stanley, and he was going to bank on the number eight. It’s his good-luck number.

“It was 8/8,” Kind recalls, “and I told her we were going to a party on West 88th Street.” It was just a ruse. He wanted to get her to an area with double eights. Then, at eight minutes after eight, he got down on one knee in front of 18 W. 88th St.

“I said, ‘Eight is my lucky number, and if you say yes, I’ll be the luckiest man in the world.’ ”

But she said no.

It worked out, though. A month later she turned that no into a yes. And it’s clear that a man who’d propose with so much planning and precision is a man who’d be very particular about where he lives.

He and Dana (a fund-raiser for Project ALS, an organization battling the brain disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) married in 1999. After having three children (Skyler is 11, and twins Samantha and Max are 8) and living in a couple of places, they still hadn’t found the home of their dreams.

Then, in 2009, they went to an open house — in the West 80s, of course — and saw exactly what they’d been hoping for. “It’s a great apartment,” Kind says. “It’s big, but not huge. It’s a nice space, but it’s not ornate or grand. It’s just a real comfortable living space. We bought it right away. We didn’t finagle, we just said yes.”

The landmarked 1899 co-op building was created by famed architect Emery Roth. “It was called ‘Emery’s Folly,’ ” Kind says, “because it was his first apartment house, and the story was that he’d made mistakes in his design.”

The couple paid $2.5 million for the 2,500-square-foot apartment, which consists of three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a laundry room, a small office, a dressing room and a sprawling kitchen/dining/living area.

“We sort of created this space because there used to be walls separating the kitchen, dining room and living room,” Kind says. “We knocked all that out and made the room as wide as we could.

“To be honest, that’s what they do in LA. And we moved from LA so we could be in New York. This is where I wanted to raise my kids.”

For the children, they made a long workstation against a wall of the reconfigured room (which they call the family room), so that each child gets desk space and shelves. When they do their homework, they can still be part of the kitchen activities.

Beyond this big room, Kind enjoys how you “have to go down a long, windowed hallway to get to the bedrooms and the bathrooms. And as you walk down the hallway, you literally head downhill. That’s because the building is so old, it’s settled.”

Another thing he prizes are the wood floors; some of them are original.

And for furniture, the family is sticking with items they bought years ago at ABC Carpet & Home. “We got a lot of our pieces when I was doing ‘Spin City’ here in 1996,” Kind says.

They have two big, beautiful leather wing chairs, a Victorian table, a hand-carved chest from the 1800s and more, all from ABC Carpet & Home. “Back then, Robert Verdi helped us pick out our pieces,” Kind says. “But nowadays, he’s a celebrity style expert and we couldn’t afford him.

“Our style is whatever the kids won’t break. Look how the couch sags! The dog and the kids jump on it. But this is a home. It will evolve into a well-designed home when the kids are into a well-designed lifestyle.”

But that doesn’t stop the adults from having beautiful and meaningful things. Like the scarf they bought in India. Dana had it framed and it now hangs in that long hallway. It’s just opposite a wall of photos of the kids as they grow.

More treasures: Kind’s grandparents’ Bible, a set of antique Don Quixote books (complete with wood carvings) that was a gift from Carol Burnett, their collection of Deruta ceramics from Italy and an Al Hirschfeld portrait of Kind.

Their daughter Skyler has her own design ideas. “She went to bed one night and woke up the next morning in love with the boy band One Direction,” Kind says. “I don’t know how it happened. But one of the kids is from Ireland, and she started reading everything she could about the Irish. I got her a $5 map of Ireland, and her heart just stopped. She didn’t have words to express how much she loves that map.”

As for his work life, Kind has been in everything from the sitcom “Mad About You” to the New York City Opera’s “Candide” (he played Voltaire) to the Oscar-winning film “Argo.” And now he’s been nominated for a Tony for his performance as studio head Marcus Hoff in “The Big Knife.”

“I’ve played Hoff before,” he says, “in Williamstown in 1998. Bobby Cannavale saw that production and has wanted to do the play since then.”

Kind’s scenes, playing a bully in a world of nasty machinations, look exhausting. “You know what’s exhausting?” he says. “I have a great scene that lasts about 17 minutes, and then I spend an hour and 15 minutes offstage. Trying to keep your energy up when you’re offstage is a very difficult thing. So I stretch for 15 minutes and then I watch an episode of ‘Breaking Bad.’ And then I start preparing again for my second scene. That’s another 17 minutes. So I have two scenes in the play, and they’re separated by a good long time.”

And after those two scenes, for which he was also nominated for a Drama Desk Award, he heads back uptown and home.

“When we moved to New York, we lived on Amsterdam and 79th Street,” he says. “We love the Upper West Side. We’re away from the heart of the city and into a real neighborhood. This apartment is where we plan to stay.”

Richard Kind’s

favorite things

* Bella, his Bernese Mountain Dog, and Toby, the hypoallergenic cat

* The collection of Deruta ceramics from Perugia, Italy

* A photo taken in Italy of fields of sunflowers with Dana in the background: “It’s my favorite photo in the entire world,” he says.

* His portrait by Al Hirschfeld

* His mother’s piano

* The maquette (mold) used for Molt, his character in “A Bug’s Life”