Soho’s long-stalled The Renwick is back from the dead, and much improved. Developer Eldad Blaustein purchased the development, now known as 15 Renwick, for a mere $11 million after it was foreclosed on, and he has tapped architect Eran Chen of ODA for the redesign. The result, from the limited looks we get from the initial renderings, appears to be a big upgrade (not that that’s saying much, as the original Ismael Leyva design started and ended with a flat glass wall.) Even better than the redesign is 15 Renwick’s new marketing campaign, which features, for reasons that are not entirely clear and not in the slightest bit important, four Steampunk-ish scalie characters. The scalies, an astronomer (seen in the above rendering astronomer-ing off his private terrace), a boxer, and two aristocratic ladies, are meant to appeal to “people who are creative, different,” according to Blaustein. He continues, “We always joke that it might be a Wall Street trader, but he’s writing songs, he’s writing poems at night.” We can only hope that the buyer that these renderings appeal to gets up to some weirder stuff at night than writing poems.
So who came up with these people? Brokerage CORE is leading the marketing, and they teamed up with March and IF Studio to create these fictional, modern aristocrats that will hopefully lure buyers to the building.
The 11-story, 31-unit building is slated for completion in 2015. It will include 24 two- and three-bedroom asking between $2 million and $5 million, as well as three adjoining townhouses ($3.9 million to $7.5 million) and four duplex penthouses ($7.85 million to $10.5 million). Sales will launch in September.