NEW YORK — Peter Marino has become famous for designing residences and retail environments for a list of clients whose names could easily fill any department store: “Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Giorgio Armani, Dior, Chanel, Vuitton. We could go on,” he offers, laughing.
Now, for the first time, he’s created a residential condominium building, which one might say is more for the stroller set. Just don’t call the units “luxury condos,” a term that makes Marino apoplectic. “That’s what they are selling on 14th Street,” he snorts. And this building is most certainly not downtown: Its address is 170 East End Avenue, a stone’s throw from Gracie Mansion, the sedate streets of Beekman Place and — perhaps most important — private schools like Chapin, Dalton and Spence.
The architect, clad in his signature tight black T-shirt and black leather pants, with leather cuffs on both wrists, is presiding over a meeting at his art-filled East 58th Street office. Condo queen Louise Sunshine — the exclusive sales agent for 170 East End — prowls the halls outside, rolling calls on her cell phone. Marino, meanwhile, is discussing quality, a term he fervently believes in. “If you do anything in life,” he proclaims, “do it in a quality way.”
He points to the marble slabs in the building’s lobby, more marble in the master bathrooms (not the “stupid 12-by-12 tiles you can buy at Home Depot,” he’s quick to point out), the “real parquet” floors and the 10-foot, floor-to-ceiling windows. Not to mention the 5,000-square-foot communal garden complete with sheep sculptures by French artists Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, who are being feted tonight with a party at the building. Marino was adamant that developer Orin Wilf, a scion of the Garden Homes real estate company, put up funds for an art budget along with the money for a 12,000-square-foot, fully staffed amusement space that includes yoga rooms, squash courts, a screening room and a golf simulator. Even the underground garages are decorated with murals and light installations.
Marino, who terms himself a “modern” architect, avoided angering the notoriously touchy Upper East Side residents by matching the heights of his building to those of existing homes on surrounding blocks. “I didn’t do a Charlie Gwathmey with this,” he says, fiercely scribbling on a pad — a reference to the blue, shiny curves of Gwathmey’s Astor Place building. “I don’t scream trendy,” he says. “I always say to Karl and Donna,” he continues, referring to his fashionable friends Lagerfeld and Karan, “‘it’s so easy, guys. You can always do the trendiest thing of the moment in a dress, and you don’t care if your customers are going to wear this in four or five years. We’ve got two years of drawing and planning, two years of construction. If I start with a trendy idea, who the hell knows what it’s going to look like in four or five years?’ It’s like a joke to do architecture in a trendy, trendy way.”