This Apartment at New York’s Plaza Hotel Has Central Park Views From Every Room

An apartment at New York’s iconic Plaza Hotel that comes with Central Park views from every room has hit the market for $7.95 million.

The residential unit, located on the 13th floor of the French Renaissance-style, mixed-use building on the southeast corner of the park, offers 1,825 square feet of living space with two bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms, according to the listing with Emily Beare of CORE.

“What is most compelling about the residence is every room is met with a punching view of Central Park…not every unit in the Plaza has this, making it a prime offering,” said Ms. Beare, who listed the property last week.

Designed by Piers von Westenholz, one of Britain’s renowned designers and antique furniture dealers, the home features high-end finishes and fixtures from both Europe and North America, while maintaining historic details including original Plaza doorknobs, high ceilings and refined built-ins, according to the listing.

The living room has northern exposures of Central Park and is adjacent to a chef’s kitchen, equipped with Nero Marquina stone countertops, mosaic Calacatta marble-tiled backsplash and appliances by Viking and Miele. All the bathrooms are adorned with custom marble mosaic patterned floors, the listing said.

The current owners, whose identity is shielded by a limited liability company, bought the apartment in 2010 for $9.25 million, property records show.

“They decided to list it as they’re not finding themselves spending as much time in New York City as they once used to,” Ms. Beare said.

Amenities at the Plaza Hotel—a National Historic Landmark built in 1907 by Henry J. Hardenbergh and whose notable former owners include Conrad Hilton and Donald Trump—include concierge services, a 24-hour doorman, Warren-Tricomi Salon, Caudalie Vinotherapie Spa, La Palestra Fitness Center, the Rose Club and the Grand Ballroom.

“The ideal buyer is someone who wants to live in one of the best units in a quintessential New York City historic building,” Ms. Beare said.

There are around 180 private residences in the hotel-condo building.

Drifts of ground cover plants and wildflowers along the steps of the Sydney Opera House, traffic obscured by meadow-like planting and kangaroos pausing on city streets.

This is the way our cities could be, as imagined by landscape architect Jon Hazelwood, principal at multi-disciplinary architectural firm Hassell. He has been exploring the possibilities of rewilding urban spaces using AI for his Instagram account, Naturopolis_ai with visually arresting outcomes.

“It took me a few weeks to get interesting results,” he said. “I really like the ephemeral nature of the images — you will never see it again and none of those plants are real.

“The AI engine makes an approximation of a grevillea.”

Hazelwood chose some of the most iconic locations in Australia, including the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, as well as international cities such as Paris and London, to demonstrate the impact of untamed green spaces on streetscapes, plazas and public space.

He said he hopes to provoke a conversation about the artificial separation between our cities and the broader environment, exploring ways to break down the barriers and promote biodiversity.

“A lot of the planning (for public spaces) is very limited,” Hazelwood said. “There are 110,000 species of plants in Australia and we probably use about 12 in our (public) planting schemes.

“Often it’s for practical reasons because they’re tough and drought tolerant — but it’s not the whole story.”

Hazelwood pointed to the work of UK landscape architect Prof Nigel Dunnett, who has championed wild garden design in urban spaces. He has drawn interest in recent years for his work transforming the brutalist apartment block at the Barbican in London into a meadow-like environment with diverse plantings of grasses and perennials.

Hazelwood said it is this kind of ‘complex nature’ that is required for cities to thrive into the future, but it can be hard to convince planners and developers of the benefits.

“We have been doing a lot of work on how we get complex nature because complexity of species drives biodiversity,” he said.

“But when we try to propose the space the questions are: how are we going to maintain it? Where is the lawn?

“A lot of our work is demonstrating you can get those things and still provide a complex environment.”

At the moment, Hassell together with the University of Melbourne is trialling options at the Hills Showground Metro Station in Sydney, where the remaining ground level planting has been replaced with more than 100 different species of plants and flowers to encourage diversity without the need for regular maintenance. But more needs to be done, Hazelwood said.

“It needs bottom-up change,” he said. ““There is work being done at government level around nature positive cities, but equally there needs to be changes in the range of plants that nurseries grow, and in the way our city landscapes are maintained and managed.”

And there’s no AI option for that.

This Apartment at New York’s Plaza Hotel Has Central Park Views From Every Room

A new AI-driven account by leading landscape architect Jon Hazelwood pushes the boundaries on the role of ‘complex nature’ in the future of our cities