A block of apartments in Chartres, France — a lovely, lovely place — might have looked like any other, were it not for four months of what must have been strenuous painting.
Aren’t they fun? Various areas are done in differing styles so you get a little taste of everything. I sadly don’t know anything about these apartments other than their locale, but more pics can’t be seen here.
Looking for an apartment that’s a little different and have a spare $25 million laying about? Then you’re in luck, because the most expensive apartment in Brooklyn may still be on the market! The apartment was created by David Walentas, father of Dumbo, in an old but rather nice industrial building that he converted into offices and later, into condos. Renamed the ClockTower building, for obvious reasons.
Those being the four gigantic clock faces that adorn the tower, which coincidentally is where the most expensive apartment in Brooklyn is located. That’s right, in addition to a whopping 3,000-square-foot main floor and a 2,300-square-foot second floor, you get a 988-square-foot open loft, high ceilings, and amazing views from 14-foot windows that overlook the Brooklyn Bridge and New York Harbor.
Oh, and you get the joy of always knowing the correct time, so long as you’re good with reading clocks backward!
Note that I do not have a free $25 million laying about, but I’ll happily move into the most expensive apartment in Brooklyn if anyone might be so kind as to donate the fundage. Heck, I think those clocks are so cool that I wouldn’t even mind if they went tick-tick-tick, and that’s saying a lot since I’m rather obsessive about ambient noise.
Note, too, that the buyer of the apartment need not worry about the nightmare of having four terribly big clocks each showing a different time. According to Walentas, the four clocks are electronically synchronized to show exactly the same time. That time being, of course, not rich o’clock, but rather poor o’clock.
Living small. Small space living. Whatever you want to call it, there are people doing it all over the world. Some get into small space living out of necessity — usually because either the money or the space simply isn’t there. Others do it because they want to see how low they can go when it comes to their ecological footprint. And I suppose there are those who think that 175 sq. ft. is plenty, thankyouverymuch.
Zaarath and Christopher Prokop appear to be just that, according to the NY Post. They work a lot, they don’t eat in, and they don’t host guests, which is why they had no qualms about buying a microstudio — possibly Manhattan’s smallest — for $150,000.
The kitchen is used to store the few articles of clothing they keep in the microstudio, with most of their clothes living at various dry cleaners. Oh, and the couple’s two cats eat on the counter. There’s naught in the fridge other than espresso and champagne. A queen bed takes up a third of the microstudio, and the bathroom is the size of a small closet. At a mere 14.9 feet long and 10 feet wide, you can bet it feels a little claustrophobic.
“I’m amazed we can fit two people and two cats in there,” Zaarath said. “But it’s harmonious at this point. I have friends who say they could never live with their husbands in a place this small. It’s a good thing we like each other enough to live there.”
The only other resident of the microstudio is the couple’s Roomba, which must scare the bejeezus out of those poor cats every time it’s turned on. On one hand, I applaud Zaarath and Christopher Prokop for making the most of the space they can afford — they’ll apparently be able to pay off the $150,000 in a mere two years. On the other hand, they seem a little self-congratulatory about their knack for small space living.
