Details:
Price: $4 million ($3,652 maintenance)
Specs: 2 beds, 2 baths
Extras: Private roof deck, wood-burning fireplace, home theater system, Thermador wine fridge, shared courtyard, pool and steam room.
10-minute walking radius: Angelika Film Center, Washington Square Park, Il Buco
Listed by: Corrin Thomas, Serhant
When Corrin Thomas was a teenager in Ireland, his father, a general contractor, tapped him to help with a project: turning an old warehouse into apartments. When he moved to New York years later to work as an actor, a friend asked him for help house-hunting, and he promptly fell back in love with renovations. He started working as a general contractor, then got his real-estate license. “I can see if something could be great,” he said. “I have vision.”
As a real-estate agent, he liked to spot deals: apartments that would shine with a remodel, which he could sketch out on the spot, offering an estimate and helping oversee work or connecting buyers with contractors. At the same time, Thomas and his partner, Jesse Adelaar, started looking for a place for themselves, a search that kept bringing them back to 200 Mercer Street. Like the warehouse he converted with his father, Mercer was originally commercial. The 1871 brick building had been designed as a stable, with an entrance to the side, in a shaded private courtyard. At the far end of that yard was a lobby, shared with a building behind it, an 1853 warehouse that fronted on Broadway. None of the 26 co-op units across the two connected buildings were alike, and six had private roof gardens, including a two-bedroom duplex that was on the market.
It needed work. A living area had 12-foot ceilings and a working fireplace set into warm, original brick, but it also had a wall with a hutch that cut into the space, narrowing and darkening the room. The primary bedroom on the upper floor faced a private garden but was lacking in storage. Thomas oversaw everything, gutting walls down to the studs, building back up a home that included clever interventions he schemed up for clients, or ideas he wanted to try in their spaces but couldn’t pull off. Click a remote and a hutch across the room opens to reveal the projector. Press “play,” and sound comes through a wall that you might have assumed was covered in floral wallpaper. “I don’t think there’s anything in this apartment that wasn’t custom,” he said. And a lot of it is custom millwork: A bar is walled in walnut, cherry cabinets wrap two walls of the living area, and the floor is ash — wood he selected to pick up on “multiple tones in the brick,” he said. Then there’s a library ladder; a custom copper vent over a stove, and, in the dining room, a wine fridge that fits 300 bottles. “I’ve never been able to sit still.”
The building was converted to apartments in 1985. By 1991, the sculptor Carole Feuerman, known for her beached swimmers, had moved in. Ten years later, the Tony-nominated director Elizabeth Swados arrived. And designer Nanette Lepore came in 2002. Even in 2010, when Thomas and Adelaar bought, the building “wasn’t full of finance bros,” he joked. He met a violinist and a radio host. Neighbors would hang out and chat in the shared courtyard or hold buildingwide parties on their roof decks and private yards (four units share another courtyard). Thomas and Adelaar, who are now married, have thrown some of those parties, and some of the neighbors who admired what they saw tapped him to renovate their apartments, too.
Thomas kept working on the place — redoing a roof deck in 2020, when quarantines forced him to spend more time there, and more recently updating the primary bedroom with a wall of walnut cabinetry. But his focus is now elsewhere. When a friend backed out of redoing an apartment in midtown, he bought the place himself, and that renovation is going so well he’s tempted to move there. (He added a hot tub with a view of Times Square.) Plus he and his husband fell in love with a house upstate that will need as much of his time as he can give — a stone house from 1730, once owned by a relative of Martin Van Buren. “Anything I do, I want it done to a level I’d be happy with so I could live there. Do it right or don’t bother.”
