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Cynthetiq · 01-11-2008, 09:25 PM

A bit off topic but there are people who are more interested in making a home that suits them even if they do rent.

It is something that Skogafoss and I contemplated when she had a rent stabilized apartment in the Village. It was a nice sized place but the shower and vanity was in the bedroom and the living room had a small water closet for a toilet. Turned out we didn't have the stomach to sink in that much money into something we didn't know if we'd keep. Good thing too because we spent a good $25k on the place that we did end up buying in the Lower East Side.

Quote:

April 15, 2007
Sinking Your Money Into a Rental
By VIVIAN S. TOY
NYTimes.com
PEOPLE buying a co-op or condo think nothing of putting in a new kitchen, adding a bathroom or moving a wall. They know that the work will only increase the property’s value.

Renters, on the other hand, will not spend a penny to improve an apartment because they know that someday they will leave it all behind. And unless they’re rent-regulated — and, these days, sometimes even if they are — they have no idea how long they can stay in one place.

That, at least, is the conventional wisdom.

But some renters have very clear ideas about how they want to live. And they will not let a lease or even market-rate rents get in the way. To them, sinking $5,000, $30,000, even $100,000 into their rental is money well spent.

When they signed the lease for a duplex they wanted in Greenwich Village three years ago, T. R. Pescod and Tim O’Brien knew that it would have to be gutted to suit them. It took four months and $100,000 to turn the apartment into the kind of home they wanted.

“The place was a mess, but the bones of the apartment were great,” said Mr. O’Brien, a hedge fund manager. “We looked at dozens of apartments to rent and buy, and we knew the value in this place, and if you amortize the cost of what we did over four years, it made sense economically.”

They first signed a two-year lease at $7,000 a month and then took an option to renew for another two years at $7,700. Other apartments they looked at rented for as much as $20,000 a month. Although they didn’t have an exact timetable, they figured their money would be better spent on renovating where they knew they could stay for at least four years.

“We didn’t sharpen our pencils to the month,” Mr. O’Brien said. “But looking at what else was out there, it was the choice between renovated space that wasn’t done well or in a way we liked and the opportunity to put our own mark on this.”

With vacancy rates for Manhattan rentals hovering around 1 percent, the scarcity may lead more renters to lease apartments that need work, make a deal with their landlords and then subsequently do the work themselves.

Mr. Pescod oversaw the work on the Greenwich Village duplex, which included putting in a new kitchen and two new bathrooms, building a closet in the second bedroom, installing new light fixtures throughout the apartment, putting a new awning on one of the terraces, building covers for all the radiators, replacing moldings, sanding the floors and painting the entire space. The result was a meticulously renovated apartment that gracefully maintains the character of the 19th-century brownstone.

Mr. Pescod, a model and actor, said that the decision to renovate was a very visceral one for him. “For me, this was all about the upstairs,” he said, referring to the top-floor master bedroom, which has a soaring ceiling, two terraces and a fireplace. “It’s an amazing space that’s flooded with light.”

It didn’t hurt, of course, that both men are serial renovators who have redesigned other apartments in Manhattan and houses in Southampton.

“Ultimately, you’re creating your home,” Mr. Pescod said. “You have to put that into the opportunity cost, too, because we were able to make this into a warm space that we can call our own.”

Friends thought they were crazy, he recalled, “but once they saw it and the benefits of living here in this unique space, they understood.” Mr. O’Brien said their landlady, Roberta Russell, was very open to their ideas and even agreed to chip in $10,000 for one of the bathrooms, which she had intended to fix for some time. They shared all their plans with her and showed her samples of materials along the way. The only thing that gave her pause, Mr. Pescod said, was the new closet, which she feared would take up too much space and might make the apartment harder to rent to new tenants.

Ms. Russell said that she and her husband, Harold Krieger, were very happy with the renovations. They own several brownstones in the Village and Chelsea and other property in upstate New York.

“We felt very lucky,” she said. “They had impeccable taste, and they had the discretionary income and the time to build it to suit, so it was worth it to them.”

But not all renovations are so successful. “We weren’t always this lucky,” Ms. Russell said. She said that she and her husband once had tenants who were months behind in their rent and went ahead with major renovations without permission.

“It was beautiful for them, but not good for the landlord because the changes were very unique to their lifestyle,” she recalled. “So when they left, we had to pay to undo what they had done.” The tenants had removed walls and created a sunken media room, among other things, she said.

As landlords go, Ms. Russell is probably more flexible than most in allowing Mr. Pescod and Mr. O’Brien to do as much work as they did.

Landlords typically frown on tenants’ doing their own renovations and generally require that apartments be returned to their original condition, with some allowances for wear and tear. Some building owners strongly advise against allowing renters to renovate. Frank Ricci, a spokesman for the Rent Stabilization Association, a landlords’ group, said: “For a renter, it would be foolish unless they have an ironclad contract that they can stay there for a set period of time. And speaking as an owner, I would not want a tenant, who has no financial stake in a building, contracting to do major work. I just wouldn’t recommend it."

Ogden CAP Properties, which owns and manages several very large Manhattan apartment buildings, allows major changes only with written consent.

“Some things could be considered an improvement that I could keep,” said John McDermott, Ogden’s senior manager for rental buildings. “But not everybody’s taste is the same, so in other cases, the tenant is responsible for putting things back the way they were.”

Amanda Miller, who lives in an Upper West Side building owned by Ogden, said that when she eventually moves out of her $3,000-a-month one-bedroom apartment, she will have no problem returning it to its original state. “Nothing I’ve done is permanent,” she said. “But everything I’ve done was designed to make this feel like a home. There’s no point in having a place that feels like a hospital room.”

Ms. Miller, a public relations executive, said she had spent about $4,500 to paint every room of her apartment, to replace the generic light fixtures with ones more to her liking, to retrofit three walk-in closets for her collection of vintage clothes and to build a closet for her 200-plus pairs of shoes.

What she has done certainly makes her apartment distinctive in an otherwise standard postwar building. The living room is painted claret red, the kitchen is pumpkin orange, the bedroom is pink, and the bathroom is a bright turquoise. She has a crystal chandelier in the bedroom, a Moroccan lamp in the hall and, in the living room, sconces that look like hands holding up torches.

“Just because I’m 28 and maybe not a real grown-up quite yet doesn’t mean I can’t create an environment for myself,” she said. “I go with this apartment, or maybe this apartment goes with me.”

Ms. Miller’s mother, Linda, said she was happy to help her daughter put her mark on the apartment and helped pay for some of the work. “So many people live in rentals in a temporary state of suspension, thinking: ‘Maybe I’ll only be a here a year,’ or ‘Maybe I’ll fall in love or get a job,’ ” she said. “But it should be about this being your moment and enjoying it right now.”

Just as Ms. Miller’s renovations largely revolved around her need to accommodate her passion for collecting vintage shoes and clothes, Ben Schechter and his partner, George Barimo, put about $30,000 into their East Side apartment to accommodate their art and antiques.

Mr. Schechter and Mr. Barimo have lived in their rent-stabilized apartment for 11 years and pay less than $2,000 a month, but they have been residents in the building since 1968 and put just as much work into their previous apartment. They both said they would have redone the apartments even if they had been paying market-rate rents.

“The world is so abrasive out there, I want to be able to leave the streets and be surrounded by things that are handcrafted and beautiful,” Mr. Schechter said. “This is an oasis for us.”

The renovations included putting up Sheetrock over a wall of glass brick that they found unappealing, building walls to partly enclose the living room and to create more wall space for their art, installing a decorative fireplace and 19th-century columns, and adding a hall closet and a wall of built-in shelves in the bedroom.

“A lot of the changes were made to accommodate our collecting,” said Mr. Schechter, a retired theater designer. “We had to personalize the space because an apartment should really be a backdrop for people, a place where they can feel comfortable.”

Mr. Barimo said that over the years, they have had opportunities to buy other apartments but opted instead for a country house in upstate New York. Mr. Barimo is a television producer and said that when the “Tonight” show moved to Los Angeles in 1972, he could have bought Doc Severinsen’s three-bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive for $38,000. And Mr. Schechter said there was a nine-room apartment that had been offered to them for $125,000 during the 1970s.

“We have no regrets because we never minded renting,” Mr. Schechter said. “In the end, what do you really own? We’re all just custodians of what we have.”

Finally, in a stratosphere all their own are buildings like the Waldorf Towers. There, rents range from $15,000 a month for a one-bedroom to $130,000 a month for a penthouse, and renovation requests are handled on a case-by-case basis, according to Margaret Bay, the broker from Brown Harris Stevens who handles all the building’s rentals. Apartments there have been home to the likes of Cole Porter, Frank Sinatra and Mamie Eisenhower.

In one $130,000-a-month apartment rented by a corporation, the tenant put an estimated $1 million into renovations, Ms. Bay said. The work included a new kitchen and the redesign of an entry rotunda with elaborate marble accents and murals of a Tuscan village. Nothing was done without the building’s approval, and when the corporation recently moved out after 15 years there, the Waldorf Towers wound up buying most of the furnishings.

Ms. Bay said another resident, whom she described as a Park Avenue socialite, completely renovated her six-bedroom apartment and then asked if she could install a lap pool.

“We worked on it for about a year to see if it could be done safely,” she said. “We tried to accommodate her, but it just couldn’t be done.”