The Hunt: A Pied-à-Terre for East Coast Sojourns

To her, however, a cabin was a small apartment. Her idea of woods was towering high-rises. Her idea of a getaway was New York City.

Ms. Baiz, who owns a jewelry and diamond wholesaler called Big Sky Gold and Diamond Brokers, has lived her whole life in Great Falls, Mont. Nearly 20 years ago, when she and her husband were having the kitchen of their century-old house remodeled, they hired a contractor who had a gem brokerage on the side. Ms. Baiz, formerly a radio reporter, seized the chance to learn the business, and later branched out on her own.

She had never been to New York until she came for a trade show a dozen years ago. After that, every time she returned for business, she liked the city more. “I had a knot in my stomach getting back on the airplane, because there was so much more that I didn’t do,” she said. “It felt like going to your favorite restaurant, ordering an appetizer and then leaving. I had too much of an appetite for New York.”

So she began visiting for weeks at a time, staying in hotels or taking sublets. Her longest stretch was last year — a 10-week stay in a Chelsea high-rise while she took a writers’ workshop. Ms. Baiz, who blogs at wedgeblog.net, writes for jewelry magazines and Signature Montana magazine.

Her husband, Tom, a lawyer who also works for her, came to visit. Over breakfast at the Aroma Espresso Bar on West 72nd Street, he suggested that she avoid the expense of hotels and the hassles of sublets by buying a small place. With their son and daughter out of college, the time was right.

“While he was in the mood for something,” Ms. Baiz said, they ran across the street to an open house for a sunny studio co-op.

“I stood outside that building and asked people, ‘What is the best thing and the worst thing about living here?’ ” Ms. Baiz said. Location was the best thing, residents told her. High maintenance was the worst. The studio’s monthly maintenance was more than $900.

The Baizes made an offer in the low $300,000s. It was declined. That was when Ms. Baiz, who ended up making four trips from Montana in the course of a year, began the hunt in earnest. Her budget maximum was $400,000, and she was determined to keep the monthly outlay under $2,000.

Her many sublets had taught her what to avoid. After staying in a high-rise, she knew she wanted a prewar building with thick walls and less risk of neighbor noise. After staying near a firehouse, “even though my dad was a fireman,” she said, “I didn’t want to live across from sirens.”

At one Upper West Side place, the seller rejected her offer in favor of a lower one from a colleague. She was disappointed, but “this did give me faith that money isn’t everything, even in New York real estate.”

Near Union Square, the selling agent guaranteed that she could move a wall to create a sleeping nook, but a contractor informed her the wall was immovable. That undermined her faith.

At the Orienta on West 79th Street, the seller accepted her offer of $353,000. Maintenance was in the $800s. She had been told that the co-op allowed pieds-à-terre on a case-by-case basis, but her case was declined.

“I was devastated,” she said. “They had a willing seller and a willing buyer.” Knowing she needed guidance from someone with expertise in Manhattan co-ops, she e-mailed three agents she found online, and chose Robyn Frank-Pedersen, a senior vice president of the Corcoran Group.

Ms. Baiz told Ms. Frank-Pedersen that she didn’t mind a studio, as long as the layout allowed for some kind of sleeping spot, eating area and writing nook. She wanted a diverse neighborhood, one that provided the “yang to Montana’s yin,” she said. “I wanted to walk down my hall at dinnertime and smell at least three continents.”

Ms. Baiz liked the bachelor-pad aura of a place on West 15th Street, even though she originally mistook the Pullman kitchen, behind folding doors, for a closet. The price was around $410,000, maintenance a reasonable $560.

But the building had no doorman. She decided she needed one, primarily to keep houseguests at bay when she was back in Montana. “I didn’t want friends and relatives to look at my apartment as a key exchange, like, ‘Oh, well, just get the keys from Claire and use her apartment,’ ” she said.

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Dusting Off the Maid’s Room

The Laureate, a new 20-story building at the corner of Broadway and 76th Street, has four such apartments — each has four or more bedrooms and is priced at about $11 million. The maid’s room is listed simply as another bedroom, but it is away from the others, closer to the front door and living areas. Two of the building’s penthouse units even have separate entrances that lead directly to the servant’s rooms.

“When we designed this building,” said Shlomi Reuveni, a broker at Brown Harris Stevens Select, which is handling sales, “we felt that the traditional layout with a full dining room, an entry gallery and separate quarters for live-in help was missing from the market. Combining that in a building with modern amenities was even harder to find.”

Other new developments with maid’s rooms in some of their units include condominium conversions of prewar buildings at 845 West End Avenue and 905 West End Avenue, as well as the Sheffield, a postwar tower at 322 West 57th Street.

Demand for family-sized apartments with separate quarters for live-in help has been so marked at the Laureate that the Stahl Organization, the developer, has decided to combine some smaller apartments to create more units that fit the bill, Mr. Reuveni said. Many of the interested buyers are coming from abroad, but others, he said, already live on the Upper West Side and are looking for homes that mirror the classic apartments in nearby prewar buildings. While the rooms could also be used as guest rooms or offices, most prospective buyers have said they will use theirs either for a live-in nanny or a housekeeper.

The Sheffield has four large apartments that come with a dining room, a playroom/family room, a library, and a fourth bedroom that has been labeled a maid’s room. “We were trying to play off the vernacular of the Classic 7,” said Jacqueline Urgo, the president of the Marketing Directors, which is handling sales at the Sheffield.

The apartments, listed for about $7.5 million each, are designed to feel like “a single-family home in the sky,” Ms. Urgo said. “More and more parents are choosing to raise their children in Manhattan, and we have seen a need for these very large spaces.” Many potential buyers have live-in nannies, “because people have full lifestyles and maybe you have two working parents,” she added. “This type of apartment does fit a need.”

Maid’s rooms built in the 1910s and 1920s tended to be barely six to seven feet wide. Apartments that came equipped with them have three or more family bedrooms and might originally have had more than one maid’s room. At 905 West End, the developer Samson Management took a Classic 8 — which had three bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen and two maid’s rooms off of the kitchen — and shifted and expanded the bathroom that had been shared by the maid’s rooms, combining the remaining space to create one larger room.

“This way, for people who can have live-in help, they don’t need to fit them in a tiny box; they can have a proper bedroom,” said Louise Phillips Forbes, an executive vice president at Halstead Property who is heading up sales for the building. Listed as four-bedroom apartments, they range from $2.74 million to $2.925 million.

“People like it for the long-term play,” she said. “They can use it for an au pair or live-in nanny while their kids are young, and when a child gets old enough, he or she can have that space, or it can become an office.”

Traditional maid’s rooms get no light, said Iva Spitzer, an executive vice president the Corcoran Group, who has helped convert many prewar buildings and is helping to sell 845 West End. “They have a closet that you could fit a pair of sneakers and jacket in, and they have a sliver of a bathroom that is so small they couldn’t fit the sink in the space, so the sink is in the bedroom.”

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Currents | Deals: Sales at Ligne Roset, John Robshaw and Others

Floor samples are on sale at the Ligne Roset store in SoHo through Sunday (the leather Harry armchair, originally $3,750, is $2,195; the Eaton 63-inch table, regularly $3,540, is $2,479); 155 Wooster Street (Houston Street), (212) 253-5629, ligne-roset-usa.com.

During the John Robshaw sample sale, May 3 to 6, bedding, pillows, table linens and robes will be sold at deep discounts (Jade pattern quilts, originally $325 to $435, will be $80 to $100; Diggi Coral duvets, regularly $375 to $525, will be $80 to $100; Walnut Running Stitch coverlets, above, originally $410 to $525, will be $80 to $100; Dervish bean bags, regularly $200, will be $75); 245 West 29th Street, (212) 594-6006, johnrobshaw.com.

Outdoor patio furniture is marked down as much as 70 percent during the spring sale at Modani Furniture, through May 15 (the Coronado patio set, which includes two armless chairs, three corner chairs and a coffee table, was originally $3,740 and is now $1,490; an outdoor bar and six stools, regularly $3,490, is $1,290); 40 East 19th Street, (212) 796-6926, modani.com.

At Doris Leslie Blau’s spring sale, May 3 to 22, some 80 custom and antique carpets will be discounted as much as 50 percent (a pair of Art Deco rugs by Paule Leleu, originally $15,000, will be $7,500; a 14-foot-9-inch by 9-foot-10-inch Art Deco area rug also by Paule Leleu, regularly $65,000, will be $32,500); 306 East 61st Street, (212) 586-5511, dorisleslieblau.com.

Good deals may be reported to deals@nytimes.com

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International Real Estate: House Hunting in ... Prague

$1,056,890 (17,600,000 Czech koruna)

This two-bedroom rooftop apartment in a restored neo-Classical building is close to the center of Prague in the Vinohrady neighborhood, which is named for its 19th-century vineyards. The unit has 1,345 square feet over three levels; it is entered on the sixth floor of the building, which has an elevator. The terrace commands views of Prague’s red-tiled rooftops.

The entry foyer is on the second level, the site of the main living space, which has wood floors, a high ceiling, and walls of concrete and exposed brick, as well as a horizontal gas fireplace recessed in the wall. The kitchen, a contemporary room on a raised platform of old pine, is adjacent to the living space. Countertops and table surface are made of polished black granite; cabinets and table base are of cherry wood. A bath off the kitchen has a radiant-heated floor, copper-tone metallic wall tiles, a glass rain-head shower by the German designer Hansgrohe, and a basin by the Italian designer Ceramica Globo.

The second level has its own terrace, of nearly 100 square feet; it is reached through custom doors framed in dark meranti wood from Southeast Asia, which slide and fold like an accordion.

A curved staircase of cast concrete unwinds like a ribbon to the third level, which has an exposed brick wall and a large skylight that can be opened electronically. This level — which mimics a balcony, looking down onto the living room — houses one of the bedrooms.

The first level has the other bedroom and the bath, which has a heated floor and is equipped with a wall of white cabinets and a ceramic bathtub with chrome claw feet by Roca, a Spanish company. A round mirror with an ornate gilt frame hangs over a pedestal sink by the German designer Keramag.

The apartment has central air-conditioning and is being sold furnished except for the chairs, said Jiri Eyberger, a broker with Home Sweet Home, the Prague brokerage that has the listing. A flat-screen television is also included (satellite TV service costs $35 a month; Internet and telephone fees are $20 a month).

The immediate area is quiet and abuts a large park, Riegrovy Sady, which has a beer garden. The Vinohrady neighborhood is popular with young professionals and international residents for its numerous pubs and cafes, shopping centers and restaurants. The area is within easy walking distance of Wenceslas Square in central Prague and has convenient bus and Metro service. Ruzyne-Prague Airport is about half an hour by car, 40 minutes by public transportation, Mr. Eyberger said.

MARKET OVERVIEW

Home sale transactions in general dropped 40 to 60 percent after the economic downturn in 2008, and the market has been largely stagnant since then, Mr. Eyberger said.

However, the apartment inventory most popular with foreigners — in neighborhoods in the historic center of Prague or close to it — has not been as hard hit. This is because owners of renovated apartments are typically not selling, said Michal Bukovecky, a co-owner of the brokerage iReality.

“They’re trying to keep the prices very high, and that’s why they don’t sell,” Mr. Bukovecky said. “They’re expecting the market will get better, but so far the market is very slow.”

This apartment costs about $786 per square foot and has been on the market since February; it would be more likely to appeal to foreign buyers than Czech natives, Mr. Eyberger said.

“The price is quite high,” he added, “but it’s due to the unique character of the apartment, the materials used and the location in the city center. This is more for expatriates, because Czech buyers would prefer a house and garden for this price.”

From a foreign investor’s point of view, the price would be about right. Mr. Bukovecky says that homes bought by expatriates typically range in price from about $335 to $1,115 a square foot, with some in more expensive areas like the Old Town selling for as much as $1,725 a square foot.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 28, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated a market statistic. It was home sales transactions in Prague that fell off 40 to 60 percent after the global economic downturn in 2008, not real estate prices.

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In the Region | Westchester: Board Scales Down Plan for Reader’s Digest Site in Chappaqua

CHAPPAQUA

ALMOST seven years after developers paid $59 million for the 114-acre Reader’s Digest property in this affluent hamlet, drafting plans for 348 condominiums and town houses next to the publisher’s former headquarters, the town board of New Castle has finally ruled on the application.

The board did not reject Summit Development and Greenfield Partners’ plans for residences on the property — since renamed Chappaqua Crossing — out of hand. But it strictly limited the number of units that may be built and the part of the property where development may occur.

The developers were aware of the town’s resistance to the scale they had in mind, twice reducing the size and scope of their plans, most recently seeking 199 units. But that was still too many for the board, which early this month announced that it would allow 111 condos and town houses, on just 31 of the 114 acres.

The reason, according to Barbara S. Gerrard, New Castle’s supervisor, is not that the board opposes affordable multifamily housing in Chappaqua, a hamlet of mostly single-family homes — though that is what the developer, known as SG Chappaqua, alleges in two lawsuits. Nor is it that neighbors at public hearings vehemently opposed the plans, citing concerns about increased traffic and overcrowded schools.

Ms. Gerrard said residential development was reined in to leave sufficient land for commercial development in a town where businesses — mostly the small shops in downtown Chappaqua and in Millwood, another hamlet — contribute less than 3 percent to the tax base.

With an eye toward generating more commercial revenue to support the town’s $36 million annual budget, the board also lifted restrictions on how many commercial tenants SG Chappaqua may house in the property’s central structure, a three-story red brick office building with a towering white cupola.

Occupied mostly by Reader’s Digest from 1939 until it declared bankruptcy in 2009 and broke its lease with SG Chappaqua, the structure now has only three tenants in 95,000 of the 700,000 available square feet. Town zoning had limited occupancy to a maximum of four tenants in no more than about 470,000 square feet of the building.

Clearly, the departure of the Digest, a major taxpayer for 71 years, has had a profound effect. Ms. Gerrard described the decision to allow 111 multifamily homes as “difficult but necessary.” Many residents had wanted the property to remain as rolling hills and manicured lawns.

“As a former tax attorney,” Ms. Gerrard said, “I know how hard it is to make everyone happy. I also know that if the two ends of the spectrum walk away from the table not really satisfied, then you probably did a fair job, and if one end is ecstatic, then you should review your decision.”

SG Chappaqua, which has refused to comment on the case, is dealing with its unhappiness in Federal District Court in Manhattan and State Supreme Court in White Plains. Both suits were filed in February, months before the board reached its decision.

Among other things, the state lawsuit accuses New Castle of discrimination for violating a settlement reached last year by Westchester County with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to create fair and affordable housing in 31 Westchester communities that have few black or Hispanic residents.

The settlement was designed to prevent the further concentration of affordable housing in cities like Mount Vernon and Yonkers, which already have a preponderance of low-income blacks and Hispanics. New Castle is almost 90 percent white, and its median household income is $193,866, among the highest in the county.

Also, SG Chappaqua, thwarted in its attempt to build upscale residences, is demanding that the town buy the property. In addition to the $59 million it paid Reader’s Digest for the acreage and the buildings, SG Chappaqua says it has spent $10 million on architects’ and lawyers’ fees and environmental reviews, among other things.

The other lawsuit charges the town with violating the federal Fair Housing Act.

New Castle is preparing its rebuttal and “expects to vigorously defend the action,” said Clinton B. Smith, a lawyer with Wormser, Kiely, Galef & Jacobs in Manhattan and White Plains.

Victor Siber, a longtime Chappaqua resident, called the developer’s accusations of discrimination a “red herring,” noting that 20 percent of the residences approved for Chappaqua Crossing are to be sold below market rate.

Robert Greenstein, a Chappaqua homeowner and a Manhattan lawyer who collected 900 signatures on a petition opposing the developers’ plan, approved the board’s decision. “This is not about a town being elitist,” he said. “I don’t buy the developer’s argument that we’re against affordable housing.” He noted that the hamlet also planned to build affordable units outside the Digest site.

Mr. Greenstein said commercial development would relieve the tax burden on homeowners.

A resident of Chappaqua for seven years, he said, he pays about $35,000 a year on his five-bedroom colonial, built in 2004. “Compared to other communities, our taxes are very high,” he said. For example, in Armonk, home to the corporate headquarters of I.B.M., the taxes on a comparable seven-year-old colonial are about $27,000.

“What we need is an I.B.M.- type company of our own,” Mr. Greenstein said.

But for now, as the legal actions work their way through the courts, most residents would like to see the property’s rolling hills and gardens better maintained, said Mr. Siber, who lives on nearby Cowdin Lane. “It’s not a wasteland, but it’s not maintained anymore like it was,” he said.

Geoff Thompson, a spokesman for SG Chappaqua, says the company employs four workers full time to maintain the grounds.

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Square Feet : Evan Stein

J.D. Carlisle manages about 600,000 square feet of commercial space and nearly 2,000 apartments citywide. Its developments include Morton Square, the Cielo, Gramercy Green, and the Beatrice.

Q Are you the de facto C.E.O.?

A Yes, absolutely. There’s no C.E.O. The chairman is my partner, Jules Demchick. Our chairman is responsible for assemblage of the property, financing, and usually the initial plan. Once the acquisition is done, he moves on to the marketing and we move to the development. M.D. Carlisle Construction is the vehicle that physically builds the projects. With buildings like the Beatrice you almost need to know the end of the movie before you begin.

Q Will the Beatrice, your newest and biggest project, have a happy ending?

A I hope so. I put my grandmother’s name on the building.

Q Was this your most difficult development?

A It’s by far the most expensive, and this was the most complicated. We have several uses in this building, so that takes a tremendous amount of management to understand how all the pieces work together: how the restaurant is working with our hotel, how the residential building complements the hotel. And we have a garage.

We’re certainly not in the black yet, because the building is in its infancy, but from an economic view we’re pleased with the results.

Q What is the occupancy?

A We are 99 percent. Of 300 rental apartments, we have left four penthouses that we are just allowing for occupancy May 1. All the penthouses start at $20,000, up to $23,500 monthly. We’re already getting a lot of activity on them. And the hotel’s doing well; it’s exceeding our expectations.

Q Why rentals and not condos?

A We cut our teeth on rentals. In the ’60s and the ’70s, we built probably 60- or 70-plus rental projects. The rentals are scattered all over Manhattan. Our recent history was condominiums — we had three or four projects that were a function of the times.

It’s hard to put your heart and soul into something where at the end of the day you don’t have a tangible asset anymore.

Q Would you ever consider converting the Beatrice, if, say the market soared again?

A I hope not. I’d be lying to you if I told you I haven’t been asked that before. We have several rental buildings that have gone through four or five real estate booms, but we like rentals.

Q What’s your assessment of the New York market now?

A In the long-term perspective we’re very bullish, but you’re going to have short-term challenges — whether they be economic, political or availability. There are still tremendous opportunities here, and we’re seeking them out.

Q Do you have any other projects in the works?

A We do have three or four projects that we’re excited about. Unfortunately, we can’t talk about them because we’re under confidentiality agreements.

They’re going to be some rental, some condo; three are ground-up and one is a gut renovation. We’re looking at a couple in the outer boroughs at this point in time, and certainly in Manhattan.

Q So why doesn’t J.D. Carlisle have a Web site?

A We get asked that a lot. We’re low-profile people; we don’t usually have to advertise who we are.

Q You knew at an early age that you wanted to be involved in real estate, didn’t you?

A Yes, because my hero was my grandfather, who founded this business — my maternal grandfather, Beatrice’s husband.

He has been my hero since the minute I could understand who he was, and I would have done anything to be with him — to be him. When I was graduating from college, he asked if I would consider coming to work with him. I jumped at the opportunity and 17, 18 years later, here’s where we are. He’s since retired.

Q What was your first job there?

A I went to school for accounting so I started off computerizing their accounting systems, and I got bored very, very quickly. I made the request for an assistant superintendent’s job. I went to work with a hard hat climbing into the demolition. Just being on a construction site every single day helps me to understand how things wind up working, all the nuances that you need to understand.

Q Do you live in any of your buildings?

A I live in Morton Square. One of the advantages of developing is you get a good price.

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At Home With Moby: A Castle for the King of Techno

THERE are a number of things that delight Moby, once the ultimate downtown New York musician, about his castle in the Hollywood Hills: the gatehouse turret, from which the original owner’s pet monkey screamed across the canyons when the house was built in 1920s; the lore, both rock ’n’ roll and literary and decadent, that has the Rolling Stones living here for a spell, Aldous Huxley residing across the street and porno films shot around the pool; and the hidden room — a former tiki bar — that at one time had a fake grass ceiling and pictures of Hawaiian dancing girls, which he cannot show you, because this house is so new to him that he can’t find the key.

There is also what he calls the “penultimate” Hollywood view, for which you have to go up the stairs to the master bedroom. Be careful: Moby’s one rule is no shoes on the rug. O.K., now plop down on the rumpled bed. Looking through the window straight ahead, you can see the canyon fall to the Hollywood Reservoir; to your right and up the hill is the famous Hollywood sign. If he were a Hollywood producer and wanted to impress some actress, Moby says, he’d use that view.

Has he had the opportunity to impress anyone here so far?

“I had a date, which ended up making out under the view of the Hollywood sign, but nothing too crazy,” says Moby, who is so slight as to be almost as much of a caricature as the drawing on his gray T-shirt. Make that a caricature in pencil. I don’t fit in here? No problem. Rub me out. I work alone a lot of the time anyway. In appearance, Moby is either Jules Feiffer’s illegitimate son, or he was drawn by him.

But back to the view from the bed and that date. How’s that relationship going?

“At present, it’s ambiguous. Back in my drinking days, I used to be a little more promiscuous, but now in sobriety, I’m like a nun.” A quick correction: “A monk.”

It is a heck of an impressive view, he is told; it should have had some effect.

“She came from a very wealthy background,” Moby says. (Anyway, what fellow wishes his appeal to be property based?) “Hopefully she was impressed by my wit and character.”

Not so long ago, Moby, a musician and composer Billboard once named “The King of Techno,” was the hippest of downtown guys, running a teahouse/vegetarian cafe on his Lower East Side home turf, where he sometimes stopped in to wait tables, headlining at the Bowery Ballroom and going on about soy milk (well, he still talks about soy milk).

But now, while he keeps a small apartment in Little Italy, he has moved to Los Angeles, to a castle on three acres with a stone wall, a Disney-esque gatehouse and a kidney-shaped pool.

Called Wolf’s Lair after its first owner, L. Milton Wolf, a real estate developer, it is a house with old Hollywood flourishes that Norma Desmond would embrace. On the hill overlooking the castle, mounted on a tall pole, is a lamp shaped like a crescent moon, so there will always be the reflection of a moon in the pool, a perfect example of 1920s Hollywood romance. I’ll buy you the moon, baby.

Moby paid just under $4 million for the house last year and estimates he has put another $2 million into its restoration.

For an alternative-music guy, Moby, 45, has been doing very well. He has sold 5 million albums and 2 million digital tracks, according to Nielsen SoundScan (his music has been used extensively in soundtracks and commercials), and he has a new album, “Destroyed,” out next month. Written while he was touring, “Destroyed” is “broken-down electronic music for empty cities at 2 a.m.,” he says, and indeed the music has an echoing, futuristic loneliness.

Moby decided to move to Los Angeles for a number of reasons: New York is so expensive that many of his interesting, creative friends have had to leave; the winters; and that more difficult thing from which to remove oneself, the winter of the soul. The techno musician turns out to have a more debauched past than his persona suggests.

“I stopped drinking a few years ago, and I got to say that the cold and nastiness of New York in February was a lot easier to handle when I was a crazy drunk,” he says. “If you’re hung over when it’s sleeting outside and 40 degrees, it doesn’t seem so bad.”

Are we talking alcoholism here, A.A. kind of stuff?

“A.A. we’re not allowed to talk about, but yeah,” Moby says.

What made him stop?

“Simply the consequence of being hung over 48 hours after being drunk for six hours,” he says. “It didn’t used to be that way when I was in my 20s. I could stay up till 7 being drunk, and the hangover lasted for two hours. In my 40s, the hangovers lasted for days, and they were debilitating and soul-destroying. I simply had to stop.”

IF one were to tell a life story through the houses one has lived in, Moby’s would be particularly rich. A descendant of Herman Melville whose real name is Richard Melville-Hall, he was born in Harlem, when his father was a graduate student at Columbia.

Moby and his mother moved into her prosperous family’s Connecticut home when his father, whom she was divorcing, died driving drunk. His mother, who died of lung cancer 13 years ago, was a sometime secretary and devoted hippie. In 1969, she took him to live in San Francisco.

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