Here we thought 40 Bond Street was one of the greatest building of the past generation. (Maybe that's not saying much, since this is New York.) But this riotous video from Curbed shows that opinions are far less uniform than the lofty windows on the Herzog & de Meuron-designed, Ian Schrager-built condo project in Noho. The highlight is clearly the angry neighbor who calls the place "a piece of shit" and "Frank Lloyd Wrong."

"They looked on Broadway, they looked on Bleecker," Prudential Douglas Elliman's Faith Hope Consolo told The Observer, but the tenant landed instead in a classic old-world showroom and corporate event space at 42 Bond Street. "This is in their DNA," said Ms. Consolo, who represented the tenant along with Joseph Aquino. The tenant took an entire 5,700-square-foot floor and wanted another.

The store is just two blocks from the perfumery's flagship, and, of course, has the vital Bond Street address. "They were in this neighborhood long before it was chic," Ms. Consolo said. "They were one of the first stores; now it's so arrived, so chic."

Indeed, the new space is next door to Ian Schrager's wannabe star magnet, 40 Bond Street.

lkusisto@observer.com 

Mr. Schrager, the pioneering boutique hotelier, was referring to his palatial penthouse apartment at 40 Bond Street, an exquisite cast-iron recreation he developed last decade with renowned French architects Herzog & de Mueron. But even these Pritzker Prize winners were not up to the task of designing Mr. Schrager's personal pad atop the green-glass-and-graffiti-gated building. For that, archminimalist John Pawson was brought in.

Pawson’s minimalism requires a kind of maniacal precision and a purity of materials. (Think sheets of extra-clear glass 12 feet 8 by 7 feet 4 dropped into place by cranes, not to mention a Brazilian-basalt hot tub.)

And yet even these exacting standards failed to suit Mr. Schrager.

“This apartment is the most sophisticated thing I have ever done. It’s about the quality of the materials,” Schrager says, adding that he tore out hundreds of Austrian-white-oak floor planks when the color did not turn out to his liking. “Everyone was saying, ‘Leave it! It’s not worth it!’” he says. “I wanted a wide-plank gray-beige floor, and the second time we installed it I approved every plank.

Bad. Ass. But what else do you expect from the guy who brought us Studio 54 and the Royalton? Now if only he can get things squared away with Aby Rosen at their Gramercy Hotel and finally launch his new venture with Bill Marriott, life should be pretty good.

mchaban [at] observer.com / @mc_nyo