Twelve years ago, Adam Kushner saw a for-sale sign outside a townhouse and called the broker. “I don’t remember his last name, but he said he was on the TV show Million Dollar Listing and asked if I wanted to be on TV,” says Kushner. “I said, ‘I’m sorry, are you selling a house or not?’ And he said, ‘I’m selling a house’.”
And that is how Kushner, an architect and developer, was featured on the first two episodes of Million Dollar Listing New York’s second season, as he embarked on what he says was an extremely straightforward transaction that became distorted (only on film) into a saga of high drama. “They made it out that the sellers were rapacious, horrible people, and they just were going to, like, suck us dry,” he says. “It was so ridiculous.”
Only slightly less absurd was the situation he quickly found himself in after purchasing the Greenwich Village townhouse for US$3.75 million. The heat failed after moving in with his wife and two young children in the dead of winter. “I’m sitting in the living room with my heaviest coat, a wool hat, and cursing the day I was born because I can’t believe how stupid I was to buy this dumb house,” he recalls.
But Kushner recovered his wits and reminded himself of why he’d bought the home in the first place: Despite its many idiosyncrasies, it was actually a great deal. “I was going by the upside value,” he says. “I saw in it what others didn’t see.”
After a roughly 10-year renovation, that potential is now on full display in the house, covering 4,200 sq ft (with an additional 1,200 sq ft of exterior space). It has four bedrooms and four-and-a-half bathrooms and includes, among other things, a transparent outdoor rock climbing wall that rises above the structure.
Naturally, almost as soon as the project was complete, his kids went to college. “It’s a lot of house, and it’s just my wife and me,” Kushner says. As such, he’s putting it on the market, listing it for US$20 million ($26.5 million) with Diane Wildowsky and Lonni Levy of Sotheby’s International Realty–Downtown Manhattan Brokerage.
Endless construction
Before Kushner, the circa 1925 townhouse was occupied by celebrity events planner Robert Isabell. Kushner says Isabell, a favourite of New York’s high society, gutted the interior. “He ripped out everything — he turned it into this weird open space with no kitchen and a giant living room filled with plants.” He also added a sauna in the basement that accommodated six and installed a glass-covered catwalk that connected the front house with a small house in the property’s rear.
Isabell died in the home unexpectedly, and the property then briefly passed into the hands of individuals who tried and failed to open a restaurant in the building. They then sold it to Kushner.
He first discovered that the house wasn’t landmarked but soon would be. Time was of the essence, then, to submit plans before any renovations became tied up in red tape. The easiest thing to do, says Kushner, would have been to “knock down the damn house and build a new one”. But he wanted to “respect the neighbourhood and leave the facade and instead pull the entire front of the building back and build up”.
He means that literally: The original facade now stands almost freeform, and visitors enter through its front door into a small courtyard between the old facade and the new building. This was not a plan that involved tweaks — this was “a complete gut renovation besides the exterior walls”.
The year he bought it, Kushner enrolled the townhouse with Open House New York tours, a not-for-profit programme that allows members to tour hidden interiors around the city, “and people would come back every year”, he says. “Everyone wanted to see: What did the guy do this year? How close is it to being done? I kind of had groupies, who’d be like, ‘Love what you did this year!’ and by year seven or eight, they’d be like, ‘You’re almost there!’”
And finally, by the end of 2022, he (mostly) was.
The finished product
Rising behind the front facade is a five-story contemporary building with a fabricated metal arbour where vines grow. Behind that building is a restored three-story structure with a glass roof.
Visitors enter into a large, open, wood-panelled kitchen and breakfast area equipped with a fireplace that can be used for cooking. Stairs and an elevator lead to a soaring, double-height living room with double exposure.
The third floor has an indoor/outdoor space courtesy of retracting doors; they “fully open to the backyard or the street, or you can close it off, and it becomes a guest room”, Kushner says. On the fourth floor are two bedrooms and a large bath; one of the bedrooms opens onto a small balcony covered in grass. The fifth floor contains a large primary bedroom suite. On top of that is a roof deck with a plumbed kitchen, barbecue area, and a solar array.
In the courtyard, an 83-foot-high transparent climbing wall rises above the glass roof that covers most of the open space. “I was going to have this wall of family history, and you’d climb it to finally reach the top of the house,” says Kushner. “That morphed into a rock climbing wall.” Kushner has been climbing since the 1980s; his son also enjoys it, although Kushner says the sport “didn’t stick” with his wife and daughter.
The rear structure has a library and built-in plunge pool on its ground floor, a guest room with a balcony on the second, and a gym with a glass roof.
“What I love about the house is it’s really a home,” says Kushner. “It has all the things you need, but it’s intentionally not high tech. I want people to have a sensual relationship with materiality.”
Kushner’s wife, who he calls “a saint”, has exacted a promise from him that their next house will be purchased in move-in condition. “I’ll keep my word,” he says, reflecting on the decade-plus he spent working on his home. “I’m not going to do that again.”
Check out the latest stories on Interior Inspiration
