Forget the Loft: The Newest Trend in Luxury Real Estate Is Walls

For Wendy Maitland, Town Residential’s president of sales, an Oscar-winning director client of hers was a typical real estate shopper with typical requests. He had a seven-figure budget and was keen to buy into one of the many new luxury condo complexes sprouting around Manhattan. The client was downsizing from a huge country house in Connecticut since his children were grown, and he planned to use a new perch in Manhattan as his primary residence. So Maitland showed him multiple locations until they whittled his choice down to two: one a luxe development on the Upper East Side, the other a new building downtown, in SoHo. The clincher for her client was a second opinion from someone he trusted—but it wasn’t his life partner, an interior decorator, or even a feng shui master. It was his art consultant.

“We sent her CAD drawings, and she went to [the house in] Connecticut to inventory and measure everything. She checked the ceiling heights, the volume, and the wall space,” explains Maitland by phone from her office in New York City, “Every space in the apartment had to be approved by the art consultant.”