(Bloomberg) -- Twelve years ago, Adam Kushner saw a for-sale sign outside a town house 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,” Kushner continues. “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 Million Dollar Listing New York’s Season 2, Episode 1 (title: “Surprise Bitch, I’m in the Pool,”) and Episode 2 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 town house for $3.75 million. Having moved in with his wife and two young children in the dead of winter, the heat failed. “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, which now covers 4,200 square feet (with an additional 1,200 square feet 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 finally complete, his kids went off 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 $20 million with Diane Wildowsky and Lonni Levy of Sotheby’s International Realty–Downtown Manhattan Brokerage.
Endless Construction
Before Kushner, the circa 1925 town house was occupied by celebrity events planner Robert Isabell. Isabell, a favorite of New York’s high society, gutted the interior, Kushner says. “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 accommodates 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.
The first thing he discovered was 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, Kushner says, would have been to “knock down the damn house and build a new one.” But he wanted to “respect the neighborhood 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.”
Kushner opted not to take out a construction loan. He instead built the house in spurts when he had the cash. “My kids, I think they just rolled with it,” he says. “It was kind of fun, but also not so fun. There were times it was raining into their rooms, there were times the heating went off, there were times we didn’t have a kitchen or gas for a year or two.” He estimates that the family moved into different parts of the house to accommodate construction at least five times.
The year he bought it, Kushner enrolled the town house with Open House New York tours (a not-for-profit program 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?” he says. “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 arbor, where vines grow. Behind that building is a restored three-story structure with a glass roof.
Visitors enter into a large, open, wood-paneled kitchen and breakfast area equipped with a fireplace that can be used for cooking. There are stairs and also an elevator, which lead to a soaring, double-height living room—it has double exposure thanks to the interior courtyard. The third floor has an indoor/outdoor space courtesy of retracting doors; they “fully open to the backyard or to 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, which has a plumbed kitchen and barbecue area along with 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,” Kushner says. “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 my daughter and wife.”) Despite the wall’s visibility, he says fewer people have tried to use it than he’d assumed, although one day “I had some guy knock on my door and say, ‘Hey, can I use your wall?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, I don’t really know you.’” That said, Kushner does occasionally let guests and friends use it. “I checked with my insurance carrier, and they’re OK with it,” he says.
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 gym with a glass roof on top.
“What I love about the house is it’s really a home,” Kushner says. “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.”
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