Keep calm, create and entertain.
That could be the motto of artist Edwina Sandys, granddaughter of Sir Winston Churchill.
Sandys loves entertaining and making art in her stunning, 6,500-square-foot loft, which the late architect Philip Johnson once called “the most beautiful loft in SoHo.” Sandys and her architect husband, Richard Kaplan, who have lived in the space for 18 years, have now put their beloved apartment on the market for $10.95 million with Douglas Elliman brokers Gabrielle Frank and Eric Liebman.
The couple, who bought the space in 1995 for $950,000, are getting older — in age, maybe, but not in spirit.
Sandys, 74, and Kaplan, 80, will be spending most of their time in their Palm Beach home — though they both say they will miss the loft tremendously.
Set in a historic 19th-century cast-iron building, the five-bedroom, five-plus-bathroom, full-floor loft features a 1,500-square-foot mezzanine accessed by two staircases, six cast-iron Corinthian columns and 11-foot-high windows. The floors are the original marble, and the radiators — made in 1874 — still work.
Originally constructed as a five-story Palladian palazzo in 1859, the building received a four-story addition in 1893 and became the showroom and manufacturing center for Ball Black & Co., the city’s leading jeweler (pre-dating Tiffany & Co.). It then morphed into a bank, and later, artists moved in. The loft, part of SoHo’s Cast-Iron Historic District, is also one of SoHo’s artists-in-residence buildings, but that hasn’t stopped bankers from moving in.
Kaplan configured the space, adding a lofty library/studio/office to capitalize on the apartment’s 18-foot ceilings. He also punched a hole through the ceiling to see what was hidden there: It turned out to be vaulted brick — raw and utterly charming. He left them exposed.
Many of the walls in the art-filled loft are painted poppy red — the perfect backdrop for her colorful paintings and white sculptures. Much of Sandys’s work deals with female themes, both light (dancing butterflies and swaying sunflowers) and dark (Eve’s hand with the apple; a female figure, “Christa,” being crucified on a cross).
There are also paintings Sandys made of her famous statesman grandfather doing his favorite things: writing and painting. Upstairs, the smaller studio — her main studio was transformed into a separate rental unit, which a new buyer can keep or incorporate back into a single-family residence — is filled with books, including ones written by and about Churchill. (“There are about three new books a year about him,” Sandys says.)
With the windows open, the views of Broadway and Prince Street anchor the loft firmly in New York City. But at night, during parties, the shades are drawn and the apartment is lit from within, creating an entirely different atmosphere, notes Kaplan.
All of this is a world away from Sandys’s former life as a debutante presented to the queen and a political wife in her first marriage to Piers Dixon, the son of the British ambassador to France. They had two sons together and were divorced in 1970. Sandys became a Sunday Telegraph columnist and a novelist before she began to focus on her art.
Moving to New York gave Sandys the opportunity to expand and to think bigger. She is currently working on a series of sculptures of columns for her upcoming show in Palm Beach. But in true Sandys mode, the columns are curvy, like women, witty and fun.