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* 3 East 95th Street Lycee Building Converted to Private DwellingSOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/realestate/14post.html"The Queen's Architect Comes to Town" This article, written by Paula Deitz, was published in the New York Times on August 14, 2005. "If Queen Elizabeth II were to wander down East 95th Street in Manhattan, she might get the feeling that something was strangely familiar. She wouldn't be wrong. John Simpson, the British architect who recently built the Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace, has just completed his first building in New York. It is a four-story mansion replacing the former Lycée Français next door to the Carhart Mansion. The two buildings have been joined and are known as the Carhart Mansion, at 3 East 95th Street, and now contain four superluxury apartments spanning the width of both houses. Mr. Simpson has long been a proponent of classical architecture adapted to contemporary techniques. In 1984, at age 30, he helped organize a landmark exhibition in London called "Classical Survival, Classical Revival," introducing the work of 20 contemporary British architects who subscribed to the classical orders and their decorative accouterments as the true language of architecture. When Zivkovic Associates Architects in New York undertook the renovation of the Carhart Mansion, it hired John Simpson & Partners to design a mansion next door. The neo-Classical Carhart Mansion itself was designed almost a century ago by Horace Trumbauer, most noted for his Acropolis-style Philadelphia Museum of Art. The mansion will include a single-level apartment, a duplex, a triplex and a penthouse, along with several artfully designed garden terraces and pavilions, giving the impression that the rooftop is a cluster of Italian villas. (There is 5,000 square feet of outdoor space.) One penthouse pavilion overlooking a small roof garden on the 95th Street side is based on the same facade of the Temple of Isis in Pompeii that Mr. Simpson used on the garden facade of the Queen's Gallery, with four Doric columns and an arch breaking into the pediment with a classically carved honeysuckle. This same floral motif, along with urns and acanthus buds, can be seen on the exterior ironwork, fabricated by Chris Topp, who also executed the ornamental ironwork in London at the Queen's Gallery. "Producing classical architecture requires fine craftsmanship," Mr. Simpson said. The unfinished one-story apartment and duplex have sold for $12.5 million and $15.5 million, respectively; the latter incorporates the Carhart's ballroom-size grand salon with 18-foot-high ceilings and arched windows. The penthouse and triplex have not been sold, and are listed at $21 million each. The apartments have from three to five bedrooms, each with a private bathroom. Carrie Chiang, a senior vice president at the Corcoran Group, said that at more than 14,000 square feet, the triplex is larger than a normal town house. It has its own door to the street and a rear garden at the parterre level surrounded by an ironwork balcony and a grand staircase. To complement the Carhart's ornate décor, Mr. Simpson's building has traditional Doric cornice moldings with dentils, gleaming white New York-style tiled bathrooms, solid-wood doors with Beaux-Arts hardware, capacious state-of-the art kitchens with polished granite counters and that bygone luxury of wood windows. As the latest architect at Buckingham Palace, Mr. Simpson joins a list of only five others since the 18th century, including Sir William Chambers and John Nash. In rebuilding and reconfiguring the public gallery at Buckingham Palace, which displays the royal collection, he established a new street entrance to the palace, a decorative Doric portico that refers to the origins of Western art. "I had in mind the Propylaia, the ceremonial entrance to the Acropolis that was the first art gallery of antiquity," he explained. No stranger to New York, he based his design for the benches throughout the Queen's Gallery on the couch in the Pompeian room until recently on display off the entrance hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art." The views expressed in this article are those of their respective authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Alumni Council or the Alumni Association of the Lycée Français de New York, Inc. |
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