It is a cautionary tale worthy of Edgar Allan Poe. Five years ago, Stewart Parr, a furniture dealer, moved into what many would consider the New York version of heaven — a 3,500-square-foot loft on Vestry Street in Lower Manhattan. Its three windows, while small, had views clear to the Statue of Liberty.
The loft was so spectacular that he began to make extra cash by renting it out for photo shoots and found himself retreating into about 350 square feet screened off in one corner. Eventually, he was faced with a Faustian choice: Should he hold on to his last enclosure or open up the view?
Several months ago, Parr, 29, succumbed. He cut a huge 70-foot-long window into his south-facing wall. The ninth-floor loft is now under the gaze of all of north-facing downtown Manhattan. Joggers along West Street habitually glance upward, curious about the life on display.
“After dark, everything completely closes down here, but then privacy disappears,” said Parr, who is both trapped and mesmerized by the dominating view. “It’s like living in a light box.”
When Steven Wagner and Maura McEvoy moved back Manhattan from the Bronx, they chose to lock out the city’s chaos, inventing an internal world. “We lived with all these little rooms and a garden,” said McEvoy, 35. “We sort of freaked out when we moved into one big room.”
The 1,400-square-foot apartment they rented is right at the Holland Tunnel, but it is easy to forget the city here. They have created a complex world inside and have shut out the exterior surroundings with enormous green shutters. Outside, the trucks rumble by; inside, water trickles from the mouth of a fiberglass lion’s head.
“The first thing I would hear when I walked into my mother’s house in Rome was the sound of a fountain,” said Wagner, 42, editor in chief of Hachette Filipacchi New Media. “In a little way, we recreated that.”
Wagner and McEvoy, a photographer, have each spent long stints working at home, and they both have family and friends who often come to stay. So even within their own walls, privacy is an issue. They found a way to make spaces grow or shrink. In fact, there are few solid walls.
The couple took two tall bookcases (standard Ikea wall units) and mounted them on heavy-duty casters. These can be rolled forward to shield an iron guest bed in a corner from living-room view or can be pulled back to expand the area into an office.
Other enclosures are even more ephemeral. A spandex screen stretches between a column and a wall to shape the dining area on the other side of the home office. A second piece of spandex is stretched above the dining table. Held taut by four simple S-hooks, it shelters the space with a light touch.
The flexibility of these spaces is such that they can be bent to the couple’s whiThe only truly fixed place is a partly walled loft bedroom, above the entrance. Vertically, it is slightly cramped (about 6 feet 1 inch). Up there they can peer through a window — decorated with rows of Haitian figurines — back down into the living room, or they withdraw into a shielded dressing room set off to one side.
“At the beginning we were conscious of all this air space between us and the guests below,” McEvoy said of their bedroom. “But now, we’ve grown to feel it’s an enclosed room. There are immense barriers here now.”
And compared with Riverdale, the silence is enveloping. “We used to hear wildcats, raccoons, college kids,” McEvoy said. “This place is like a tomb at night.”
On a more operatic scale, Hope and George Negroponte have had to find a way to balance their own lives with that of a 10-year-old child. After the couple’s marriage two years ago, Mrs. Negroponte and her daughter, Laura, invaded what had been Negroponte’s free-flowing 2,800-square-foot studio. Suddenly, one large room had to be shaped around three conflicting existences.
Clearly, the Negropontes had a dilemma: give Laura the bedroom, and their lives would be lived in the apartment’s “public” space. But if they took the bedroom, all activity would have to cease at Laura’s bedtime.
Laura got the bedroom. “She has the semblance of a normal room,” Mrs. Negroponte said. “It is a little micro-universe with a desk, a phone, a computer and TV.”
Last year, Mrs. Negroponte, a 41-year-old therapist, built a soundproof room in the space and a separate entrance for her clients. A double set of doors — one of solid wood, the other of opaque glass — seal it off from the rest of the loft. Negroponte, 43, a painter, has now rented a separate studio.
Laura’s room and the office have become the two sanctuaries in the space: the couple’s bed is only partly shielded by a partition; they find privacy only when Laura’s door is shut.
The walls are as much psychological as physical. “Laura is not allowed in the office during the week,” Mrs. Negroponte said. “Mostly, it is a sanctuary for me. But the spaces are very changeable. They become something else at night and over the weekend.”
For the couple, the boundaries are out of their hands. “They are literally dictated by the impulses of a 10-year-old,” Mrs. Negroponte said.
