A Home Designed by the Grand Central Oyster Bar’s Architect

You might not know the name Rafael Guastavino, but you’ll likely recognize his signature move: a tiled arch swooping overhead that adds grandeur to the Grand Central Oyster Bar and the colonnade of the Manhattan Municipal Building. But in 1885, before those splashy commissions (and before Guastavino patented his technique), he designed two rows of homes on a block of West 78th Street. Most have survived, helping make the stretch between Amsterdam and Columbus one of the neighborhood’s loveliest. No. 126 is the showstopper — the central home on the widest lot that once had nine other brownstones fanned around it.

With Moorish arches over the windows on two floors and a flashy coat of arms carved into the stone, the home was snapped up by a businessman and his wife, who, according to the historian Tom Miller, decorated with “Louis XV, Louis XIV and Louis XI period antiques and reproductions, all in ivory and gold.” By the 1960s, generations of boarders had carved up the original interiors, and a young couple saw an opportunity. Hugo and Priscilla Joy Dunhill hired an architect who would go on to design the Clinton Presidential Library and the glass-encased orb of the Hayden Planetarium up the block. But back then, James Stewart Polshek was just a Columbia professor hacking out renovations on the side.

The Dunhills hired Polshek to divide the five-story building into an owner’s triplex with a pair of two-bedroom apartments on the fourth and fifth levels and a small studio on the ground floor. For the triplex, he turned a new staircase into a feature — with a curved wall — and tried to turn the low, dark English basement into a social living area by lowering the floor to raise the ceiling height. (A choice that was then novel enough that the New York Times wrote it up.) He did that move stylishly, creating a cozy, sunken family room while keeping the passageway elevated so it functioned like a catwalk. On the parlor floor, in a closet and a bathroom where 14-foot ceilings weren’t exactly useful, Polshek dropped them down and carved out a space above for a small office that “contains Mrs. Dunhill’s desk, two exposures and a good deal of natural light,” according to the Times. Priscilla, a children’s-book author and journalist, worked there for two decades, and the place seemed to be suffused with her relaxed, hippie-ish sense of style when she listed it in 1989.

“When I first met her, she came out of the building barefoot,” said Peter Askin, who bought from her. Askin was born into the Durst clan — the grandson of founder Joseph Durst — and sold commercial real estate for years in the family name. Then, screenplays he wrote on the side started selling and getting produced. By the time he settled into 126, he was fresh off his directing debut, working to open a new theater, and going through a divorce. He needed stability: a place in the neighborhood where he could host his sons. The triplex felt homey — “the kind of place you want to take your shoes off,” he says, maybe because Priscilla already had, or because of the way Polshek had pulled down walls, getting rid of any formal parlors. Off the back, an extension that predated Polshek filled the kitchen with sun on two sides and had a quiet room above with a skylight that he turned into an office. “You could lie on a sofa and look at the moon or at planes flying overhead,” he said. As for the separate apartments, Askin never rented them out, instead offering the units to friends, family, and a personal trainer who all repaid him by helping whenever something inevitably broke in the 138-year-old house. He made some improvements — combining two small bedrooms to create a more livable primary suite, scrubbing the white paint off the façade so Guastavino’s designs could sing again. Still, “I don’t claim the artistic merits of the apartment,” he said. “I inherited those.”

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