Carter's Review

This very handsome, 11-story condominium apartment building at 30 Orchard Street between Hester and Canal Streets is one of the most striking not only on the Lower East Side but in Manhattan. 

An expansion in 2008 added several floors and a new façade to a 1979 building. 

Ogawa Depardon Architects designed the building.

Bottom Line

A very spiffy Modernist façade with floor-through apartments and stunning fenestration that combines wood window frames and corten steel.

Description

On their website, architects Kathryn Ogawa and Giles Depardon, in describing this project, state that “Wabi-sabi’ is “the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature, of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay and death,” adding that “it’s simple, slow, and uncluttered.”  

“It reveres authenticity above all. It celebrates cracks and crevices and all the other marks that time, weather, and loving use leave behind. We learn to embrace liver spots, rust and frayed edges, and the march of time they represent.” 

Well, there are no frayed edges here despite the architects’ poetic rhetoric, but their vision of “cracks and crevices” translated into compartmentalization and indentations resonates with the “profound” intrusion of this Darth Vader structure onto an imperfect block of tenements, many with fire escapes. 

Ms. Ogawa was a former associate at I. M. Pei & Partners and Mr. Depardon was a senior designer at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. 

The ground floor has an art gallery space that is 23-feet high and is partially indented as is the second floor and penultimate floor beneath the set-back tower. 

Amenities

The building has key-locked elevator access, floor-to-ceiling windows, a package room, available storage and a virtual doorman. 

It has no garage, no concierge, no roof deck and no fitness center.

Apartments

Apartments have eat-in kitchens with gloss cabinetry and stainless-steel appliances from Delonghi, Sub-Zero and Miele.

Bathrooms have Zuma tubs, bamboo vanities and Duravit basins.

Window s have Spanish cedar mullions.  Flooring is solid teak with a satin finish.

Penthouse A is a duplex on the eighth and ninth floors that has a 23-foot-wide living area with an open kitchen and a 10-foot-wide balcony and a 24-foot-wide roof deck on the lower level and two bedrooms and a 10-foot-balcony on the upper level. 

Apartment 5W has a 19-foot-long living area with an open kitchen and a 14-foot-long bedroom. 

Apartment 3B has a 24-foot-long entrance gallery that leads past an 8-foot-wide office and a 12-foot-long sleeping area to a 28-foot-long living/dining room with a 13-foot-long open kitchen. 

Apartment 4B has a 22-foot-long entrance gallery that leads past a 13-foot-long pass-through kitchen, an 8-foot-long office, an 8-foot-long “room” to a double-height, 28-foot-long living room with a dining area on the lower level and a 16-foot-long bedroom on the upper level.