NEW YORK—Architect Joe Eisner’s ultramodern three-bedroom loft in Tribeca is spacious and luxurious, yet highly industrial.
Media units made of Scandinavian plywood, finished concrete floors, and exposed brick blend perfectly with the hickory flooring, dark walnut millwork, trimless flush doors, and marble countertops recurrent throughout his family’s 2,398-square-foot home.
Eisner’s design aesthetic is exemplified in the sweeping, curved, polished plaster wall that dramatizes the open-plan dining area. Tribeca’s lofts are famous for their celebrity residents, such as Eisner’s former neighbor Jon Stewart, and Eisner, the architect, developer, and furniture designer, fits right in to this environment.
Born in Manhattan and raised on the Upper West Side, Eisner learned at a young age the importance of detail. His mother Carole is an artist, and his father Richard is an accountant.
“We live mainly in rectilinear spaces, from a furniture standpoint,” Eisner said, “So I always want something in my spaces that challenges that logic and free things up. So the curve is about movement,” he explained.
Soft on the eye, with a sculpture-like feel, the curved wall tapers back as it meets the kitchen to optimize freedom of movement at the kitchen’s two entrance points.
The master bedroom in architect Joe Eisner's Tribeca loft. During the condo conversion back in 2004, Eisner removed a freight elevator from this room. Eisner designed the bedside tables a number of years ago, and the Asian bench belonged to his wife Vicki Porges's late uncle. Petr Svab/Epoch Times
A bedroom that shares the wall is more spacious where the wall bows out and then tapers in slightly at the end closest to the kitchen where space is less useful.
The bedroom is Eisner’s 13-year-old daughter’s, Erin. She has a custom-made bed and desk, and a luxurious, hotel-style en-suite with walnut cabinetry, and tawny-colored tiled walls.
Eisner intentionally positioned the kitchen as the center of the home. The eat-in bar, made with walnut wood and marble countertops is framed by Eisner’s custom-designed plywood and white pleather Hudson Chair barstools.
The kitchen walls are a pleasant green, bordered by walnut and green-tinted-glass cabinetry, stainless steel appliances, and white marble countertops. The smooth finished concrete floor in the kitchen compliments the adjoining hickory hardwood flooring in the open-plan dining and living areas.
The original 11-foot-3-inch ceilings are maintained throughout the loft, except in the kitchen and at the borders of rooms where the HVAC is housed.
Joe Eisner's loft in Tribeca has a large open-plan dining, kitchen, and living area. The door with the light box above it is his youngest daughter's bedroom, and the two adjacent large walnut doors are storage cupboards. Petr Svab/Epoch Times
During the loft conversion back in 2004, Eisner removed a freight elevator from the master bedroom area, and added a gas fireplace and two extra windows in the living area. The Eisners also have a roof deck with a massive gas BBQ, and an outdoor shower, which “is more of a novelty, but it’s fun.”
Maximizing Public Space
Eisner designed their home to maximize the public living space in the dining, kitchen, and living rooms, while also balancing privacy and having more functional rooms.
“A lot of loft renovations I see today look like they could be an Upper East Side apartment project, and you don’t remember anything about what it was historically, or have a sense of all the great spatial qualities that get chopped up,” Eisner said.
As a result their home has almost no hallways. The three bedrooms open directly onto the dining area. “There’s a downside to that too, it’s a little less privacy,” Eisner said.
Eisner added short vestibules or mini-hallways inside the master bedroom and his youngest daughter’s bedroom to enhance privacy.
The master suite includes a spacious dressing room for Eisner’s wife Vicki Porges. It is located between the master bedroom and their en-suite.
The master en-suite features custom his and hers poured concrete vanities, and a deep spa bathtub. Petr Svab/Epoch Times
Porges is a pediatrician. In 2006, she founded Downtown Pediatrics in Tribeca just three blocks from their home.
The master en-suite distinguishes itself from the two other bathrooms in the home with its custom poured concrete his-and-her hand basins, which Eisner designed. Their bathroom has beautifully tiled walls, a row of modern art from his sister’s gallery, and a deep spa bathtub with glass doors.
The home’s third bathroom, at the base of the stairs to the Eisners’ roof deck, is the “iguana bathroom.” This bathroom has a poured concrete floor, and the area surrounding the hand basin has an iguana mosaic.
The mosaic memorializes Eisner’s pet iguana Paco who died at the age of 24 a couple of years ago. “I found out the sex after I named her,” he said.
Condo Conversion
Eisner was among a group of people who bought the nine-story industrial building on Hudson Street in 2001. After setting up the LLC, the group divided the 24 loft spaces and converted the building to condominiums in 2004.
“I wanted to find a building that had a corner condition because it allows you a lot more flexibility with the architectural layout and plan, versus like a typical loft: slotted space which is really bedrooms in the back, living space in the front, and something dark in the middle,” Eisner said.
Eisner converted two apartments in the building. The one he lives in and the one directly below.
“We literally moved in—I warn my clients not to do this—two weeks before my wife gave birth [to Jesse, the younger daughter],” he said, adding that otherwise they would have had two adults, two children, and an iguana living in a one-bedroom apartment.
Expensive Building
Only a handful of the loft’s original owners still live in the building. Most of the apartments have been flipped a couple of times, or have become rentals with price tags upward of $11,500 a month.
A three-bedroom on the fifth floor that is almost as large as the Eisners’ is currently asking $4.95 million.
Jon Stewart, host of the “Daily Show,” recently sold his two units in the building (9A/8B) for $17.5 million after paying $5.8 million in 2005, according to The Real Deal.
The Stewarts and the Eisners were next-door neighbors. Eisner’s daughters were friends with the Stewarts’ daughter and son.
Eisner’s Designs
Eisner Design is located in Midtown, a few blocks from Grand Central Terminal. But Eisner also meets clients at his family’s weekend home in East Hampton.
Eisner designed this glass cocktail table in their living room. Petr Svab/Epoch Times
The majority of Eisner’s architectural projects are residential, and most of his clients reside in New York City, the Hamptons, and Connecticut. Eisner recently completed his first institutional project, a preschool, in an old church on the Upper West Side. His company also does development.
Eisner sees himself as a combination of his parents’ strengths, and as an entrepreneur. Of Eisner’s four siblings two have also inclined toward the arts in their entrepreneurial endeavors. His brother is a novelist, and his sister owns an art gallery on the Upper West Side.
After college, Eisner attended Brown University, where he majored in architectural history. Going to Brown meant he could apply for classes at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). “I was very lucky, I got in,” he said. RISD was named the best fine art school for graphic design by U.S. News in 2012. U.S. News ranked Yale second.
Eisner completed a three-and-a-half-year program at Harvard. He then moved to Southern California to see what architects were doing in the other “Mecca” of the architectural world. That was the late ‘80s.
Eisner worked for Bretteville & Polyzoides, a well-known firm at the time, whose principals both taught at the University of Southern California.
After two years Eisner felt ready to move back to New York, where he went out on his own. Since it was relatively early in his career, he said it was pretty hard to make ends meet.
He later dived into developing properties to accumulate capital and to make sure that things got built.
Eisner was the architect for the new condominium building at 227 E. Seventh St., in the East Village, Manhattan, where each home has private outdoor space. The property hit the market a little over a month ago, and all but one of the six units are already in contract.
Furniture Design and Architecture
Furniture design is now a sub-specialization of architecture. “In the old days, it wasn’t like architecture, interior design, all these kind of breakouts. It was really one field,” Eisner said. “But as things have become more specialized, because the world has become more complicated over the last couple of centuries, that was inevitable.”
Eisner started really sketching out and compiling his furniture designs after being encouraged during a summer apprenticeship in Paris in 1983 with Knoll International. “I’ve probably done 200 pieces over the years,” he said.
“The furniture, I like to interject it and bring it into every project. Just even to have a piece,” Eisner said. “Say if we are designing an office, maybe we would have a custom conference table, or a reception desk, or something that had the unique quality that was distinctly related to the larger architectural environment—of that time and place.”
In his own home in Tribeca, the bedrooms and living spaces are filled with furniture that Eisner designed: end tables, chairs, desks, dressers, a cocktail table, and their 8-foot-long walnut dining table.
“I would say it has allowed me to kind of focus on a micro level that often most architects overlook. Mainly because they are working on larger projects, they really can’t focus on that level of detail sometimes. Our projects are highly detailed, and the smaller sized nature allows us to do that.”
