Of the many office-to-residential conversions happening in Manhattan right now, perhaps none has aroused as much interest as that of the Flatiron Building.
For starters, the 22-story tower is one of the most instantly recognizable buildings in the world, prominently located at the intersection of Broadway, Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street, giving would-be residents the chance to live in a landmark in a neighborhood that now bears the building’s name, the Flatiron district.
The narrow triangular shape of the building also presents something of a mathematical challenge: How do you create gracious, livable apartments on floors that lack right angles? How, in other words, do you square a triangle?
A hard-hat tour of the Flatiron last week provided clues.
Workers swarmed the site, smoothing plaster on ceilings and fitting huge slabs of Vermont marble on what will be lavish master baths.
But all was calm on the 12th floor, where a 3,900-square-foot, four-bedroom model apartment inside the building’s famous north-facing tip had just been furnished by the interior designer Rebecca Robertson for prospective buyers.
Filling the many-windowed prow is a 60-foot-long great room that includes a living area, dining area and open kitchen. A seating nook with a banquette fits into the curved end of the space, its windows looking over Madison Square Park and up Fifth Avenue.
Diagonal steel braces, original supports that help keep the skinny structure standing in wind gusts, pierce the ceiling. The supports have been left exposed, as have many structural columns throughout the building, a reminder that the Flatiron, designed by Daniel Burnham and completed in 1902, was one of New York’s early steel-frame skyscrapers. Despite the building’s extravagantly ornamented Beaux-Arts exterior, the model unit has something of a downtown loft vibe.
“These apartments are going to be some of the most unique in the city,” said the developer Daniel Brodsky, standing in the great room in stocking feet, having left his shoes at the unit’s front door in deference to the new rugs and floors. His company, the Brodsky Organization, is overseeing the condo conversion with the Sorgente Group, a real estate development firm, on behalf of a group of owners that he joined after disagreements with a previous owner led to back-to-back auctions.
But figuring out layouts for the building’s 38 units was not easy for him and the rest of his team.
Before Mr. Brodsky came on the scene, the owners, including GFP Real Estate and the Sorgente Group, were reconsidering an earlier plan to upgrade the Flatiron into a high-end office building after its last tenant, Macmillan Publishers, departed in 2019, leaving behind a warren of oddly shaped work spaces. The owners had begun to gut the interior and had determined that the mechanical core that would include elevators and fire stairs should be located in the southern half of the building, running perpendicular to Fifth Avenue.
But the core was so large and blocky that it was hard to figure out how apartments might flow around it, let alone how to fill them with normally proportioned rooms.
In the end, the architectural designer William Sofield, the founder and principal of Studio Sofield — who Mr. Brodsky hired to design the Flatiron apartments and amenity spaces — hit on the solution. Mr. Sofield proposed elongating and narrowing the core and rotating it so it ran parallel to Broadway. This meant rooms on the western side of the building, along Fifth Avenue, could be more or less rectilinear, and it also made full-floor units possible.
Mr. Sofield is bringing back historic details, repurposing artifacts found in the basement and in vaults that extend under the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue. Staircase balustrades yielded spiraling spindles that, after being sandblasted, will be used as legs for powder room basins. Steampunk fittings from the old boilers will decorate the building’s gym.
The Flatiron’s new entrance will be on its southwest corner, at East 22nd Street and Fifth Avenue, and a wooden revolving door that was added to the building in its early years will be reinstalled there after being restored by an Indiana craftsman. Hanging over the lobby — once a Western Union office — will be an enormous chandelier that Mr. Sofield designed after falling in love with a streetlamp he spotted in a historic photograph showing part of Madison Square Park.
Seating areas off the new lobby will gobble up much of the Flatiron’s ground-floor retail space, but Macmillan’s old lobby, a barrel-vaulted space running from Broadway to Fifth Avenue, will become a cafe open to the public. A bank wanted to lease the retail space in the prow, but James Lansill, who is overseeing sales and marketing of the building for Corcoran Sunshine, said the team is holding out for a “special” tenant.
Despite all the efforts with the layouts of the condos — which start at $11 million for a three-bedroom and top out at $50 million for a five-bedroom with a terrace on the 21st floor — the units do have their quirks.
In the model unit, the master bedroom is curved on one side. A hall veers diagonally. And while closets are plentiful, one wonders how prospective buyers of the multi-million-dollar apartments might feel about the tiny, zigzagging one in the model unit that ends in a sharp point.
Mr. Lansill said that there has been “substantial interest, active negotiations, contracts out and some signed.” About 20 percent of those who have expressed interest are from outside the United States, he added, while some are from the immediate neighborhood. Mr. Brodsky declined to reveal what the renovation is costing, but said that it has been “very expensive.” Selling all units is expected to yield over $700 million.
All apartments are expected to be completed by the end of 2026. But well before that — and for the first time — the exterior will be illuminated at night, marking the moment when the 123-year-old Flatiron sheds its office past and enters its condo future.
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