Heating/Cooling Unit as ‘Elephant’ in the Room
【2011-6-13】
THE Pencil Factory, a new condominium building in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, has many selling points. Its public spaces include a crisply contemporary lobby, a spacious gym and a roof terrace with views across the East River to Manhattan that elicit gasps.
The apartments — 93 mostly one- and two-bedroom units, of 623 to 1,280 square feet — have sleek kitchens with quartz countertops, and handsome bathrooms featuring gray-oak vanities.
But one detail disappoints: heating and air-conditioning units that protrude into the rooms, marring the clean lines of the spaces, detracting from the views and taking up floor area.
“People either love them or hate them,” said Joyce Kafati-Batarse, a senior vice president of Prudential Douglas Elliman, who is the exclusive broker for the building. What they love, Ms. Kafati-Batarse said, is that the units allow residents to control the temperature room by room — heat in one, and air-conditioning in another.
What they hate is obvious.
Even the architect of the building, at 122 West Street, doesn’t like the units, known in the trade at PTACs (package terminal air-conditioners, pronounced P-tacks). Calling them intrusive and “not pretty,” the architect, Daniel Goldner, said he had had no input into the choice of the units. When the developer contacted him, “It was a fait accompli,” he said. “I needed to deal with it.” The building has recently added plywood boxes to the bottoms of the units, hoping to make them look more built-in.
The units, however, don’t seem to be hurting sales. Brokers say 85 percent of the condos have sold, at prices ranging from about $300,000 to about $1 million. (Closings began late last month.)
The building’s developer, the KMW Group, said through a spokesman that the PTAC units were chosen for aesthetic and efficiency reasons. The ability to control the temperature in each room “keeps utility bills down and comfort levels up,” and ducting for a central heating and cooling system “would drastically reduce our 10-foot ceiling heights as well as take away some of the architectural details of the ceilings.”
Some of those ceilings are in an 1872 factory that was once home to the Eberhard Faber pencil company. Mr. Goldner, who has designed many buildings in Manhattan, including Modern 23 in Chelsea, was brought in by KMW, and its principal Isaac Katan, to rehabilitate the factory building and add two wings. He covered the wings in panels of brick in a variety of colors, echoing the mottled masonry of the vintage factory building.
The apartment layouts are generous — some have closets big enough to use as offices. The developer is marketing the building, in part, to people who work at home. For those who commute, the G train is three-tenths of a mile away.
Prices are about $540 a square foot. Common charges, of about 40 cents per square foot per month, are considered low — the result of decisions made by the developer to keep costs down. For example, instead of a real doorman, the building has a partially automated system that allows occupants to control access to the building remotely.
But the real draw may be the location. Greenpoint is going through a renaissance that has made it one of the city’s more desirable neighborhoods. Among the amenities is Brooklyn Label, a cafe one block east of the building, on Franklin Street, and one of the few places in the city to offer Stumptown coffee.
What lies just west of the building is a little less charming. Between the Pencil Factory and the East River is a warehouse currently housing a marble fabricator. If the site was developed, it could block the views from the Pencil Factory windows. (Hans Schenck, sales director for the Pencil Factory, said that development on the warehouse site was “not foreseeable or imminent,” but that there was no guarantee.)
One nearby waterfront block will remain open space: The site of an early WNYC radio transmitter, it is being turned into a 1.6-acre city park, including a children’s play area with a nautical theme, and a recreational pier. It is expected to open in 2012.
But what of those elephants in the rooms?
This isn’t the first building in New York to suffer from the intrusions of PTAC units. Shamir Shah, a well-known interior designer in New York, said many developers chose them instead of central air-conditioning because such systems require ductwork, which can be expensive. But generally, Mr. Shah said, the units “sit on the floor and are easier to integrate with cabinetry” than the ones at the Pencil Factory. Set directly into walls a foot or two off the floor, the Pencil Factory units would be “difficult to work around,” he said.
Mr. Goldner, the Pencil Factory architect, said, “It’s a necessary evil.”
