(PHOTO, TOP) William T. Georgis's own collection outfits a model unit.

(BELOW) The dining area.

Photo Credits: Robert Wright for The New York Times. Copyright c 2010 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission.

Seen: A Model Apartment Dressed to the Nines

By Penelope Green

March 18, 2010

THE place smelled terrific. There were Jo Malone candles and tight little bunches of pink roses and calla lilies in short glass cylinders. The beds were freshly made. The stereo was on, but softly.

It felt good to sit on the cherry-red velvet wraparound sofa in the lull before people began to show up. Art books were on the coffee table, including a monograph on Michele Oka Doner, the ethereal sculptor who lives around the corner and who designed the hardware on the apartment's front door. You could see a snowboard on someone's fire escape through the west-facing windows, slick with rain.

Despite the storm, people did come, 40 in 17 groups, Justin D'Adamo, director of sales for 350 West Broadway, said later. Not that they wanted to be identified by name by a reporter, who hung back in any case, having realized her black clothing was covered in cat hair.

"I think we have a lint brush somewhere," Mr. D'Adamo, a lanky 34-year-old in a charcoal Burberry suit and blue construction booties, said kindly.

It was Sunday, the second day of the glassy SoHo development's open house, held in its fourth-floor apartment. The 3,500-plus-square-foot, three-bedroom, four-and-a-half bath, full-floor charmer was not only fully finished - with slab marble bathrooms, quarter-sawn white oak (but with a walnut stain!) floors and Dornbracht hardware (in a platinum finish soon to be temporarily extinct, because the German factory had had a fire, Mr. D'Adamo said) - but also fully furnished.

William T. Georgis, an architect who is a frequent collaborator of Aby Rosen, the building's developer, had put together a sensuous and slightly decadent mise en scŠne, with furniture and art from his own and Mr. Rosen's collections. There was much purple and red velvet, and a zoo-full of skins and hooves: a sharkskin waterfall table in one bedroom; in another, an ostrich-skin Egyptian revival chaise nuzzling a silver Bavarian footstool with wicked-looking cloven hooves. In the living room, the hindquarters of a classical statue of a horse - or perhaps horses, as there seemed to be many legs - had an end-of-days feel.

The building had been conceived during the boom times, and was born just after the bust. Its first marketing team, brokers from Stribling Marketing Associates, opened a sales office across the street in the summer of 2008 but failed to sell a single unbuilt unit. It's hard to fault their efforts: 2008 and 2009 were not the years to sell from floor plans, not the years to believe in slick renderings or to trust that a grubby construction site would morph in a timely manner into a layer cake of aspirational apartments with lapidary finishes and values of more than $10 million. (The original marketing materials include wince-making, boom-time touches like an archly written lifestyle magazine that tries to make fun of all the other slick developments' lifestyle magazines - remember when buildings were sold as lifestyles? - but achingly fails.)

Early this year, however, the project was handed over to Corcoran Sunshine, which waited until the lobby and one apartment were finished before listing the property, and then cut the prices of the seven units 11 to 14 percent. (The model apartment on the fourth floor is now $9.850 million; a 6,000-square-foot duplex penthouse with a terrace is $26 million.)

A group of college friends in their early 30s arrived in a clump of black leather and international accents: a hedge-fund analyst, a private-equity something-or-other, a lawyer in a black beret and high boots and others who identified themselves variously as Bosnian-American, Danish-American and German.

One couple lived nearby and were shopping, the wife said, for a bigger apartment or a second home out of town (they hadn't decided).

The lawyer with the beret loved the high-tech systems, the shades on their power switches and the programmed lighting, but pined for a disco ball or "a stripper's pole," she said. "You know, you tap your foot, and up it comes. You have to think of these things."

"It's not that we didn't think of it," Mr. D'Adamo said politely.

Lauren Arpel, an agent in a black pony-skin coat and black wool fedora, recoiled from the bucket of used booties in front of the elevator and tucked her own boots into a pair of fresh ones. While Tylia Chevalier, a Corcoran sales associate, showed her buyer, a professional-looking blonde with enviable skin, the laundry room, Ms. Arpel tapped the walls like a prospector looking for gold.

"I like to see how a building is built," she said.

An older couple who lived up the block weren't serious shoppers, the woman said. "We just wanted to see what `new' looked like," she said, explaining that their gut-renovated loft was in a 19th-century building.

"AIR?" the reporter asked, referring to a nearly extinct SoHo designation, the artist-in-residence building.

"Not anymore, though I had to show them my `photographs,'" her husband replied, making quote marks around the last word with his fingers.

"I wish I were an artist," his wife said, looking out on West Broadway. "I tried a few classes in Germany once, but the teacher said, `Nicht gut!'"