Vintage Pierre Paulin chairs. (Eilon Paz)
The master bedroom features a shagreen headboard that was custom-made for Gross and his wife in Paris. (Eilon Paz)
Ask “740 Park” and “Unreal Estate” author Michael Gross about his Alwyn Court apartment and he’ll regale you with stories, starting from the building’s very beginnings.
“It was once the most expensive in Manhattan,” says Gross of the 12-story building at 58th Street and Seventh Avenue. “Tenants rented for $10,000 a year back in 1909. Back then, there were only two apartments per floor; after the Depression, they turned it into six.
“David Walentas later bought it and turned it co-op. But the family who was in this apartment held on, and it was always rented within the same family. Then it sat vacant, going on and off the market for five years.”
Which meant that when Gross and his wife, Barbara Hodes, bought the 1,650-square-foot two-bedroom co-op in Sept. 2006 for $1.8 million, it was in “estate condition.” Basically, a polite way of saying that it was a total wreck.
“It was a white box with a cinnamon-and-turquoise 1970s kitchen. The floors had been carpeted, probably since the 1930s. There were layers of paint encrusted on the door frames,” Gross recalls.
There were also some surprises. Like the telephone switch box hanging on the wall of the second bedroom: “At some point, the family that lived here included Fiorello La Guardia’s personal lawyer, who then operated out of the apartment as a Broadway ticket broker for 60-plus years.”
In fact, it was the apartment’s rich history — and its prewar bones — that convinced Gross and his wife to buy the place.
“We had been living for 17 years in the Village, in a floor-through with no hallways, and we wanted a complete change, a grown-up apartment,” says Gross. “We looked for volume — high ceilings, big spaces — and a place we could impose our own taste on.”
They found it in the fixer-upper’s large foyer, its impressive 30-by-20-foot main room (with south and west exposures), the spacious master bedroom and the combination sitting room/guest room/office.
“We mostly talked about what we wouldn’t do, before we talked about what we would build,” says Gross of the renovation, which took about a year and cost “in the six figures.”
Which meant no central AC (that would have destroyed the curved ceilings), keeping the two bathrooms’ original tubs and tile and stripping down rather than replacing the metal frames around the doors. What they did build: bookshelves — lots of them.
For the walls, the couple used an oil paint that Gross had shipped from England via Canada, since such paint is no longer available in the US. “It has a different look, a warmth to it,” he says.
Most of the decor and furnishings are, in fact, European — bought on many of Hodes’ travels abroad (she’s the owner of knitwear firm Bibelot).
Chandeliers in the foyer and kitchen are from the Café de Paris in London and were purchased in a London flea market; from the Marche aux Puces in Paris: twin vintage Pierre Paulin chairs, a mirrored 1940s commode and a brown velvet daybed, one of several in the apartment. (“We are big fans of daybeds,” says Gross.)
They also had several pieces custom-made in Paris, including the shagreen-and-bronze headboard: “It took seven months to have it made.”
Another splurge is artwork: “[Dealer] Holly Solomon convinced me I should celebrate the publication of every book by buying a piece of art,” says Gross, who just published the LA-focused “Unreal Estate.”
To that end, the co-op is filled with photos by Bert Stern, Richard Avedon, Slim Aarons and William Wegman; lithographs by Larry Rivers; pieces by Raoul Dufy; and, of late, Egyptian pieces — “we love classical antiquity.”
But Gross concedes that even after living here five years, the home is still a work in progress. His office still needs sprucing up, some vinyl LPs (waiting to be digitized) still occupy a corner of the living room.
“We just got some of these horns and Egyptian remnants,” says Gross, gesturing to the pieces scattered around the living room. “But what I’m looking for is the perfect piece of taxidermy. I really want a mounted cat.”
MICHAEL GROSS’ FAVORITE THINGS
* Two drawings of his wife, Barbara, by Antonio Lopez
* Several Larry Rivers pictures, including one of his wife
* Various Egyptian fragments
* A statue of Alice in Wonderland holding a gun
* His photography collection (mainly ’50s and ’60s fashion and portraiture) that decorates the rooms and corridors