Entire living rooms become balconies in a new Lower East Side mixed-used development

A four-story tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan was recently renovated and turned into a nine-story mixed-use development. The development includes an art gallery on the ground floor and seven stacked condominiums.

The owners informed G Ateliers Architecture, the project’s architect, that they wanted each condo to have a nice balcony with good views. In New York City, however, balconies can be problematic as zoning requirements can be difficult to work with and valuable square footage used for a balcony is unusable during the winter months.

The solution was to turn the entire living room into a covered terrace-like balcony through the use of NanaWall spans. The glass portion of each floor’s façade was maximized through the use of 18-foot spans of NanaWall’s SL70 Thermally Broken Aluminum Framed Folding System. This system allowed each condo unit to have a glass wall in the living room that opened up to a Juliet balcony, essentially turning the entire room into a covered terrace.

Photo: Courtesy NanaWall.

"We wanted to create a new relationship between interior and exterior in a conventional seven-story building," says Orlando García of G Ateliers Architecture. This new relationship allows residents to have all the benefits of a large, covered terrace without sacrificing any indoor living space.

Each unit at 60 Orchard Street is being sold for between $1.2 and $2 million.