Ronda Kaysen

NEW YORK — For New Yorkers trying to buy a co-op apartment, the interview is often a grueling, baffling process.

Few New York City real estate experiences are as surreal. Here you are, days from closing on an apartment, sitting in a room across from people you hope to call your neighbors, trying to convince them that you’re normal — or at least as normal as they are. You’d think an activity as arcane as a board interview would be a mere formality. Yet it’s not.

The board interview happens at the end of the purchase process, after buyers have been approved for a loan, handed a nonrefundable deposit to the seller, and completed a board package exposing their entire financial life. By this point, buyers are so vested in the sale that they’re hardly in a position to walk away.

But the board members are not done. Most buyers who make it to the interview get the apartment, but some fail this vague test and get red-carded. (There is no firm data, but brokers and co-op lawyers estimate that about 3% to 5% of co-op applicants get rejected.) The board holds the keys to the clubhouse and could deny entry without explanation. All a buyer can do is show up and smile.

There are no hard and fast rules for what an interview is or how it should proceed. Some buyers have faced board members playing a good cop/bad cop routine to see if a candidate folds under pressure. Others get riddled with questions about their pedigree: Do they know the right people? Are they in the right social clubs? Then there are the boards that see the event as a chance to break the ice and meet a new neighbor, all while quietly assessing an applicant’s mental state. Walk in the room, and there’s no telling what you’ll get.

“It’s like a Shakespeare play — you have all these different characters,” said Karen Kelley, an associate broker for Compass. And a buyer’s job is to figure them out. “Don’t get played by anybody who appears to be your friend; don’t get put off by anybody who is acting like your foe.”

That’s what Kelley did when she bought her first apartment on the Upper West Side back when she was a young Manhattan School of Music student and had just landed her first national television commercial. Flush with cash for a down payment, she found a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a brownstone with floor-to-ceiling French windows, hardwood floors and a fireplace. “It was Parisian,” she said of the place.

She assumed the board interview was merely an opportunity to meet her new neighbors; they’d already approved her financial package. So when the board members asked her to sing and then retreated to their respective apartments for the performance, she gave it her all, belting out Puccini’s “O Mio Babbino Caro.” “I let it rip,” she said.

It didn’t take long for the only board member remaining in the room to motion that she should tone it down. It dawned on Kelley that this was not a voice audition but a test to gauge if her voice would trigger a noise complaint. “It was a total realization of ‘Oh no,’” she said.

The audition ended and she agreed to practice at hours that wouldn’t disrupt her downstairs neighbor, who worked from home. With that assurance, she got the apartment. Now, as a real estate agent, Kelley counsels buyers to choose their words carefully and say as little as possible while still somehow appearing relaxed and personable.

“It’s an inquisition,” said Doreen Courtright, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman. “I always tell my buyers, ‘When you go to the interview, don’t ask questions. Don’t say anything negative at all.’”

In other words, now is not the time to find out anything about the building where you’ll soon be living. So don’t ask when the dated lobby will get a makeover or how to contact the super for repairs. Just smile and survive.

Boards, meanwhile, see this exercise as a last line of defense against trouble. No one wants to be the one who let a problem shareholder into the community. Steven Wagner, a Manhattan real estate lawyer, is president of the board of Southgate, the co-op where he lives in Midtown Manhattan. He thinks of the board interview as part cocktail party, part mental health exam. One member of the admissions committee likens the process to “screening for psychosis,” he said.

“If you were having a conversation with me and I was nuts, you’d know it. I’d be saying crazy things or trying to talk over you; something would be off,” Wagner said. The same goes for a buyer fielding questions. “You can get a sense of whether that person is playing with a full deck.”

With the bar set so low, most buyers pass the Southgate test, even those who make for terrible conversationalists. At one interview, a woman buying an apartment for her sister came across as dishonest. Her sister, though, seemed lovely.

“We looked at each other and said, ‘We’re not going to be living with the one who lies incessantly; we’re going to be living with the one who is very sweet,’” Wagner said. So they let her in.

It doesn’t take much to derail a perfectly tense interview.

Stephanie Sladkus nearly did so at the end of one for a Midtown junior-four that she was buying in 2000 with her husband, Steven Sladkus, a real estate lawyer. As the interview wrapped up, the board asked the couple if they had anything they wanted to add. That’s when Stephanie Sladkus, who worked in magazine publishing at the time, said, with a straight face, that she liked to jump rope in high heels at 3 a.m.

The room fell silent. “It was almost like my head did a slow-motion turn left to her, like ‘Whaaaaat?’” her husband said.

She didn’t see why her comment was a problem. “There was, like, a beat of silence where Steven’s heart stopped,” she said. “And the board looked at me kind of funny, and I went, like, ‘Ha ha, kidding!’”

Her husband was certain they would lose the apartment and maybe the deposit and maybe his fledgling career as a real estate lawyer, because what real estate lawyer bombs a board interview?

But his wife was unfazed. “I grew up in New Jersey. Who knew about board interviews?” she said. “What’s there to be nervous about? Seriously, we’re two well-groomed, very nice people. We don’t stink. Why shouldn’t you joke?”

The next morning they got the call. The board could take a joke. They got the apartment.

And she never jumped rope in heels.

This article originally appeared in

(Right at Home)

How to Ace a Co-op Board Interview

A few years ago, I visited the house where I grew up. I hadn’t been back since I was 15, but there I was on a day trip with my parents and my husband, and wouldn’t it be fun to pop in and take a look around?

The surprised homeowner obliged and we stepped inside what was once the foyer of a midcentury-style house, but was now part of a large open space with no walls separating the living room from the dining room and kitchen. The homeowner, who said she had lived in the house for a few years, was thrilled to show us the changes she’d made. All I could think was: Where did our dining room go?

I peeked into my childhood bedroom, now her walk-in closet. “I used to sleep in there,” I said, sheepishly. Admittedly, it had been a dinky bedroom, but it made for a pretty nice closet.

Mostly, walking through the space felt like trying to scrub a dirty window clean. Oh right! The door to the deck was off the living room, not the kitchen. And that endless hallway to my parents’ room was actually just a few feet long. As I giddily showed my husband the space that had once been my childhood play room, my mother took a closer look at the new finishes.

The homeowner proudly showed us how she had remodeled the master bathroom. “I took out this old tile that someone had put in,” she said.

Once we had said our goodbyes and left, my mother let loose. “That was expensive Italian tile!” she said. “What was she thinking?” She was not pleased with the open-concept living room either: “That was a mistake.”

While I was happily reliving my childhood, my mother was reviewing the new owner’s remodeling choices.

The experience of visiting a childhood home works wonders if you’re angling for a trip down memory lane. It brings fuzzy and disjointed memories into focus. But a house is not static — tiles change, walls come down. If you walk into a house that has been radically altered since you lived in it, those changes may leave you feeling like someone erased you from the picture, especially if you were the one who made those earlier design decisions.

Or, if you’re the unwitting homeowner suddenly cast in the role of playing host to a version of history that no longer exists, you may wonder if these visitors are interlopers trying to undermine your claim to the place you call home.

“Who is the truer owner? The more original owner? The one who goes back the furthest? Or the one who lives there now?” said Gretchen Rubin, author of several books, including “Outer Order, Inner Calm.” “What does it mean to own a house?”

Rubin is not above putting her mark on spaces that were once hers. After her grandmother died, Rubin, who was in her 30s at the time, took a knife and carved a nick into a built-in cabinet before her family sold the house where she had spent so much time. “I remember thinking I would really like to come back and see if this nick is still here,” she said.

We often want to check in on the places where we once lived. A third of American adults have visited their childhood homes in what Jerry M. Burger, the author of “Returning Home: Reconnecting with Our Childhoods,” describes as a “widespread phenomenon.” We may take these journeys because we want to remember our youth — and what better way to do it than by walking around a house that’s no longer yours?

For most of us, the experience is positive, so long as the house is still intact and bears some resemblance to what it looked like when we grew up there. Big changes made by other people after we’ve left usually make us unhappy. And if you show up to find the house has been demolished and replaced with something else, expect to feel devastated.

“There is this need to feel that your childhood still exists in your memory and it’s an important part of you,” said Burger, a professor emeritus of psychology at Santa Clara University.

But what happens when someone shows up at your house with fond memories of a time before you lived there? You may enjoy hearing stories about your home before it was yours, or you may find the experience unsettling, like someone is trying to lay claim to a place that is rightfully yours.

In 2017, Pippa Biddle was unnerved when she learned that her new boyfriend, Benjamin Davidson, and his family had, by sheer coincidence, once lived in the house across the street from the house where she grew up in Katonah, New York, and where her parents still live. It was unsettling because it made clear that her house had a history she was not privy to.

Davidson’s family was close friends with the previous owners of the house and had visited it frequently. Davidson’s family had moved away by the time the Biddles bought the house in the mid-1990s.

By Christmas 2018, Biddle and Davidson were engaged, and so the Davidson family came to a holiday party at the Biddle family home. “I was really anxious about it before they came,” Biddle, now 27, said. “Will they think we messed it up? Because we did change a lot. We put so much love and care into this home over the years, and the idea that someone already knew it and would be disappointed by what we did was a scary thought.”

As Biddle and her mother gave the Davidsons a tour of the renovated four-bedroom house, Biddle, a writer, worried about what they would report back to the previous owners. “To have the house framed in that way is very weird, where it goes from ‘our house’ to ‘their old house,’” said Biddle, who now lives in Germantown, New York, with Davidson, 28, whom she married in June.

During the party, Davidson gathered on the front porch with his parents and sisters to take family pictures to send to the previous homeowners. Biddle was baffled by their enthusiasm for her house and felt strange as she snapped the family photo that did not include her family. “The idea of someone else caring enough about the house to want a picture on the porch of it, felt slightly strange,” she said. “It’s mine. I’m greedy.”

Of course, the house will always be Biddle’s childhood home. But it was someone else’s, too. The collision of the two worlds made clear that her life there was but one chapter in the life of the house.

In the years since I visited my old home, my childhood memories have remained intact, and separate from those of the house I visited that afternoon. Yes, I remember the new open layout, but that version doesn’t compete with my memories of Thanksgivings spent in our cozy dining room, with my mother walking through the swinging door from the kitchen carrying hot serving platters.

Even though I can still vividly remember those Italian tiles in my parent’s bathroom, I cannot, for the life of me, remember what that new bathroom even looked like.

Can You Go Home Again?

Earlier this year, I faced a conundrum that many of us who work from home know well: Where in the house can I actually work?

Unless you’re blessed with a home large enough for a dedicated office, or are a truly nomadic worker and able to set up shop on a sofa with nothing more than a cup of tea and your laptop, you’re inevitably going to have to carve out space in a room that isn’t naturally intended for work.

Any spot you choose has the potential to diminish what you had before. Set up camp in your bedroom, and you’re left staring down your desk when you’re trying to get to sleep, all those unanswered emails calling to you as you lie awake at 4 a.m. Move to the kitchen or dining room, and snack time becomes an endless loop. (Why work when you could sample that fresh salsa from the farmers market?) Steal a corner of the living room, and suddenly your prime social area feels like some weird break room outside an office cubicle.

These were my options when I relinquished my airy bedroom office to my son when he outgrew the room he had long shared with his sister. I knew this day would come, and yet, when it did, I still didn’t have a good answer for where to go.

So I went to the place where all objects with no obvious home inevitably end up: the basement.

I convinced myself it could work and outfitted the room with as many inviting details as I could muster. I installed new flooring and took out the drop ceiling, exposing the wood beams, which added height and dimension to the space. I painted the room a light color and installed recessed lighting, turning part of the space into a cozy TV room for the family. The rest would be mine. I bought an aromatherapy diffuser, filling the air with the smell of citrus and rosemary. I filled the built-in shelves with books and photographs. I even had a window. I thought, how bad could it be?

In the end, it was the window that did me in. Half the size of a regular window, and positioned above my head when I was seated, it provided an unobstructed view of the back of a shrub. If I craned my neck, I could see the sky and briefly catch a glimpse of daylight, not unlike a prisoner trapped in a medieval dungeon.

Increasingly, Americans are working from home, either telecommuting or freelancing. Nearly a quarter of full-time employees worked at home at least part of the time in 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Yet, our home work spaces often don’t reflect our eagerness to get out of the office, leaving us dissatisfied with what could otherwise be a great setup.

Sure, it’s nice not to have to get dressed and get on the train every morning. But the arrangement can quickly lose its luster. A 2015 study published in “Psychological Science in the Public Interest” found that telecommuting can blur the lines between work life and family life, leading to family conflict, while also leaving workers feeling socially and professionally isolated. You know what’s isolating? Sitting alone all day in a basement, accompanied only by the low rumble of the boiler.

In “My Creative Space: How to Design Your Home to Stimulate Ideas and Spark Innovation,” a book to be published in October, architect Donald M. Rattner argues that we don’t give our work spaces all the attention they deserve, and should instead think of our entire home as a creative vehicle, designing it with colors, light, music and art that aim to inspire.

“People do a lot of things that they don’t realize are contradictory to what makes for a good office space,” Rattner said.

Too often we find half-baked solutions for our work needs, like converting a closet, yes, a closet, into an office. Empty it of its contents, shove a desk in it and voilà, you have a home office. “Your mental space contracts in direct proportion to your physical space,” Rattner said of such a setup. “Your mind is going to narrow.”

But sometimes it’s your options that are narrow. When Savannah Ashour, 41, a freelance book doctor and ghostwriter, moved into a studio apartment in Los Angeles five years ago, she wasn’t sure how long she would be freelancing, so she didn’t want to invest too much time and money creating a home office. Her sunny eat-in kitchen had a window facing a jacaranda tree, and was large enough to squeeze in a desk, an Aeron chair and a table. With her back to the rest of the apartment, she could forget that she was at home and focus.

Last year, long after it became clear that this was no temporary arrangement, she committed to the space. She upgraded to a white sitting-standing desk from Ikea and bought a cheerful red-and-orange outdoor rug from Target to define the space. Rather than buy a traditional office chair, which she worried would be an eyesore in a tiny apartment, she opted for a stool where she could sit, lean or move aside to stand.

“Something about being shut into an apartment by yourself to work, you kind of need to build in extra perks” by making the space aesthetically pleasing and stealing the best assets, like the window facing a glorious tree, for work, she said. “At least you feel like there’s a nice trade-off for all the challenges that come with working from home.”

After three months cloistered in my basement dungeon, my bedroom started to look like a much more appealing option, despite all the warnings that it would ruin the serenity of my sleeping space. On one particularly dreary afternoon, I dragged my desk upstairs, planting it on the far wall. With my back to the bed, and facing a window, I could almost forget where I was.

Sharing your office with the bedroom brings new challenges. In the mornings, I’m often greeted with a discarded shirt, tossed on my chair by my better half, or an empty glass of water left on my desk. When I step in the bedroom, it’s hard not to notice the huge computer monitor staring back at me — hardly a soothing aesthetic. These inconveniences serve as daily reminders that this is still a temporary measure — an improvement from the dark underworld, but no equal to the charming space I had before. The reshuffling game feels far from over as I eye other parts of the house for a more perfect little corner.

Or maybe, with a few modifications, my bedroom office could be good enough. Anjie Cho, an interior architect and feng shui designer, keeps her home office in her bedroom, saying that the arrangement, while not ideal, is a common one. She suggested I could cover the monitor with a scarf at night, or hang a curtain or add a screen to separate the sleeping area from the work space. I doubt a screen would work, as it would mean losing light to the rest of the bedroom, but a scarf draped over the monitor seems simple enough.

The key, Cho said, is to give the space the attention it deserves. “If you have a home office where you’re serious about your career,” she said, “then you have to find a way to carve out some space.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/realestate/finding-the-right-place-for-a-home-office.html" id="932a434c-5c40-35ae-ab13-a0515d28c490">The New York Times</a>.

Finding the Right Place for a Home Office

Watch the HGTV show “Property Brothers” long enough and you can be lulled into believing that with a sledgehammer and enough wide-plank wood flooring, any ugly duckling house can become a dream home in an hour or less.

But if you have actually lived in a house that needs a face-lift, you probably know that even the simplest project costs far more than you expect, takes forever to finish and is invariably fraught with complications.

Jonathan and Drew Scott, the 40-year-old Canadian identical twin stars of “Property Brothers,” have built a small empire trying to prove to the rest of us that if you take out just the right wall, joy will be yours.

In the years since HGTV picked up their show in 2011 — it debuted on a local Canadian station in 2010 — the affable twins have written books, including a children’s book and a memoir, starred in and sometimes produced spinoff shows, started a design website and a line of home furnishings, and entered a partnership with Chase Bank and Pinterest to help homeowners create Scott brothers-inspired design boards. They also have a TV sitcom in the works.

I spoke with the Scott brothers by phone to find out what advice they could offer to those of us with aspirations for our homes but without the good fortune of a TV-ready duo to guide us.

To better understand the philosophy of the Scott brothers, consider their flagship show, in which each episode follows a standard refrain. The brothers take a happy but hapless couple to see their dream home, a gorgeous turnkey that checks all the boxes, only to dash their hopes by telling them the obvious: They can’t afford it.

And so begins the quest to find a less attractive house, usually one with shag carpeting and wood paneling. With fancy graphics, the brothers show the couple the home’s potential, once contractors take the walls down and install a new kitchen.

Their first piece of wisdom for would-be renovators: Not all dated homes make good fixer-uppers.

“Find a home where the bones work and you’re merely changing things on the inside,” said Jonathan Scott, a contractor and the brother who is often seen wearing a tool belt and ripping out a gross toilet without ruffling his carefully coifed black hair.

But if the house is simply too small, new cabinets and an open floor plan will not deliver that missing bedroom you have been pining for. Instead, you may need to expand the footprint, a huge expense. The national average for an addition is around $43,300, with a high-end one costing $120,000, according to HomeAdvisor.

Even cosmetic projects do not come cheap. HomeAdvisor estimates that the average cost of a new kitchen is around $23,000, with a high-end one costing $55,000. It’s no wonder that Americans handled roughly 43 million home improvement projects on their own from 2015 to 2017, according to U.S. census data. Do-it-yourself projects accounted for 38 percent of all home improvements but just 18 percent of home improvement costs, according to a NerdWallet analysis of census data.

But unlike other home improvement TV stars, the Scott brothers are not fans of DIY, even though they began their careers buying and renovating properties while they were still in college.

Some projects, like installing a backsplash, are manageable after watching enough YouTube videos, they say. But plans can quickly go awry.

“Don’t even take it on unless you know you’re willing to finish it,” Jonathan Scott warned.

A contractor will likely get the job done faster and better.

“Most people, they don’t value their own time,” said Drew Scott, a real estate broker and the brother who is usually in a dapper suit walking buyers through the offer process. A failed DIY project can make a homeowner resent the house “because it’s not turning out the way that they wanted,” he said.

He recommended starting small, with a project that can be done in a day and that is not too disruptive.

“Maybe there’s an old side table or chair you can refinish,” he said.

Well, sure, but that hardly feels like an accomplishment, unless you think of the fuchsia end table as a conversation piece.

“If friends come into your space and they say, ‘I absolutely love that side table, it’s so unique, where did you get it?'” Jonathan Scott said, you can respond with something like: “Oh funny story, I didn’t just buy it at the store.” And then, take it from there.

For bigger projects, the Scott brothers wholeheartedly endorse hiring professionals.

Americans certainly invest heavily in their homes, spending $300 billion a year on home improvements and repairs, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. How are they paying for all this work? Sixty percent of people who responded to a Chase survey said they planned to take out loans to finance it.

“Cash-out refinances were a very popular product in 2018,” said Amy Bonitatibus, the chief marketing and communications officer for Chase Home Lending.

In their partnership with Chase, the Scott brothers appear in the bank’s advertisements and on its website, marketing a Pinterest board that is as much about financing as it is about design. They recommend tackling projects sooner rather than later, and financing them with loans or lines of credit.

“Some people will save up for three years, five years to do a renovation on their kitchen,” Jonathan Scott said. “But why not just do that renovation now and enjoy that kitchen?”

Homeowners should choose their projects wisely. And in the Scott brothers’ vision, that often means ripping out some walls.

“I can’t stand it when I go into a house that’s listed and they say it’s been renovated, but all they’ve done is they’ve ripped out a kitchen and put in brand-new cabinets into the exact same bad layout, then all you have is a cramped, dated layout with your new kitchen,” Jonathan Scott said. “It’s worth spending the money on opening things professionally so you have a new footprint.”

Once those walls are down, someone has to choose the furniture. Drew Scott, who recently moved to Los Angeles with his wife, Linda Phan, describes his style as “rusticky modern,” while Jonathan Scott, who lives in Las Vegas, sees himself more as “elegantly eclectic.” In other words, “I don’t like things being too matchy-matchy,” he said.

As for the rest of us? The Scott brothers say we should just buy what we like.

While they insist that professionals should lay the floors, they do not hold the same reverence for design experts. Jonathan Scott is usually the one accompanying anxious homeowners to the furniture store, offering advice on sofas and throw pillows.

“All the fancy design terms that you see out there, none of it means anything,” he said. “Designing is a lot easier than people think. There’s not some secret sauce.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/realestate/the-property-brothers-offer-renovation-tips.html" id="2ac9d16c-58c0-3777-a3e8-fc7b8fded884">The New York Times</a>.

The Property Brothers Offer Renovation Tips

From the time Faillace bought his 1,100-square-foot apartment on East 86th Street near York Avenue for $184,000 in 1992, he began entertaining a fantasy shared by many New Yorkers. If he could commandeer the neighboring apartment, he could use that extra 800 square feet to expand his two-bedroom into a spacious four-bedroom home with panoramic city and East River views. All he had to do was persuade the neighbors to sell to him.

As it turned out, that would not be such an easy task.

Neighbors have their own plans, and over the years Faillace, 61, missed out on two opportunities to buy the unit, learning a painful truth about the odds of actually buying your neighbor’s apartment: Luck and timing are often as important as the money in your bank account.

In January 2018, after years spent nagging and cajoling his neighbors, Faillace, an employment lawyer, finally got what he wanted, but at a steep price. He persuaded the most recent owners, a retired couple who used the apartment as a pied-à-terre, to move by agreeing to pay nearly $1 million for an apartment appraised at significantly less.

“In New York, that’s the mentality — you have to buy the apartment next door,” Faillace said.

For New Yorkers who love their buildings as much as their apartments, buying a unit from a neighbor can mean trading up without stepping outside. Staying in the building allows a buyer to eliminate some of the unknowns that accompany moving — you already know how the board operates and whether the doorman is friendly. Still, the timing has to work, and if you combine the units, they must fit together in a logical way, which, depending on design and engineering, is not always feasible. But if a buyer can make it work, the end result is often cheaper than buying a large apartment elsewhere.

Such deals rely on a heavy dose of serendipity: namely that your neighbor will want to sell at the same time that you want to buy, and will agree to sell to you. Despite the luck involved, these deals do happen with some regularity, according to brokers, architects and real estate lawyers. Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel Real Estate Appraisers and Consultants, estimated that combined units account for about 2 percent to 5 percent of apartment sales in the city.

“I’ve heard of lots of people who have knocked on the door next door to say, ‘By the way, when and if you’re in the mood to sell, please come to me,'” said Steven Sladkus, a real estate lawyer and partner at the Manhattan law firm Schwartz Sladkus Reich Greenberg Atlas.

When neighbors reach an agreement, the seller can avoid paying a hefty broker’s fee and also forgo the expensive and time-consuming process of preparing an apartment for the market. A seller might also be able to command a higher price because the unit is worth more to the neighbor than anyone else.

Faillace, for example, is blind and sensitive to noise, so he treasured his quiet apartment on the 34th floor. He did not want to risk moving to a noisier space. For years he and his wife, Soraya; her daughter; and the couple’s two sons were crowded into an apartment that had a second bedroom carved out of what was once the dining room. Larger apartments elsewhere cost too much.

In 1999, long before he married Soraya Faillace, Michael Faillace passed on an opportunity to buy the unit for $160,000 because friends told him he did not need the space, a decision he later regretted. “I have been miserable since the day I didn’t buy that apartment,” he said.

The next time the unit sold, in 2004, he had a growing family and needed the space, but by the time he learned about the sale, a private deal, he didn’t have enough time to come up with a $550,000 all-cash counter offer.

Faillace began pleading his case as soon as his new neighbors, Dr. John Payne and his wife, Jane Champe Payne, moved in. But they were not interested. “I said, ‘We just got here, Mr. Faillace, and we’re very happy and we’re not going to move,'” said John Payne, 83, a retired ophthalmologist, who lives mostly in Baltimore.

But Faillace’s real estate broker, Claire Groome, an associate broker at Warburg Realty, saw hope. “Every apartment is sellable,” she said. “Everybody is movable.”

Finally, in 2017, Payne told Faillace that he would sell him the apartment for $990,000, even though it had been recently appraised for less than $800,000. Faillace wasn’t happy with the price. But Soraya Faillace, 45, wanted the apartment. And so the couple bought it in January 2018.

In mid-December, Soraya Faillace, a stay-at-home mother, walked through the family’s newly combined apartment, in the final stages of a gut renovation. She looked forward to moving back home to a space with four bedrooms, a living room, a gallery or den, a laundry room and views of the East River and the Chrysler Building. “I am super excited,” she said.

Since April, the family has been living in a $4,500-a-month rental apartment in Normandie Court on East 95th Street. “This is murder,” Michael Faillace said. “We’ve been squished.”

Despite possibly overspending on the unit, the Faillaces likely saved a significant sum by staying in the building. The median price for a four-bedroom or larger co-op in Manhattan was $4.047 million in the third quarter of 2018, according to a Douglas Elliman report. Added to that, the combined value of two units is usually greater than what each unit would have fetched separately, since larger apartments usually sell for a higher price per square foot.

“Generally, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts,” said Steven Wagner, a Manhattan real estate lawyer.

But there can be challenges. The buyer must pay the combined maintenance or common charges for the two apartments, which may be higher than for a similarly sized single unit. Buyers must also get city and board approval for a combination.

And not all apartments make for good combinations. “You have to be very careful before you pull the trigger,” said Peter Pennoyer, an architect. “There are some apartments that shouldn’t be combined.”

Examples include two units that are separated by an elevator shaft, or apartments in small tenement buildings, which are often separated by load-bearing walls. “Anything is possible if you have enough money,” said Don Friedman, president of Old Structures Engineering, in Manhattan. “But most people aren’t going to throw $1 million at combining two 800-square-foot apartments.”

Even in a larger building, neighboring units might have uneven ceiling heights or align in awkward ways. The extra kitchen must often be removed, leaving behind a space that might not have a natural alternate use. But the mechanics of physically bringing two apartments together — knocking out and repairing a wall — is straightforward and can cost around $20,000, Pennoyer said.

Some New Yorkers go through a similar process to wind up with just part of a neighbor’s apartment to expand their own homes.

In 2015, Adam and Robin Geisler had outgrown the two-bedroom that they shared with their two young children on the third floor of an Upper West Side condop, a hybrid between a condo and a co-op. But other apartments in the neighborhood were too expensive and not much larger than the space they already owned. Their friend and real estate broker, Joanna Benigno, a Halstead sales agent, lived in a one-bedroom with her young daughter on the 15th floor of the same building on Broadway and West 87th Street. She, too, was squeezed and eager for more space.

So Benigno hatched a plan when her next-door neighbor approached her to list his apartment. She and the Geislers could buy the four-bedroom apartment together. They would then divide it so that the Geislers would end up with a three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment and Benigno could add a bedroom, a den and bathroom to her existing one-bedroom unit. “They were immediately on board,” Benigno recalled. She asked the seller if he cared how the apartment was ultimately bought, and he said no. “I had always joked that I was going to buy one of the bedrooms off of him,” Benigno said.

Then came the rush to turn fantasy into reality in time for the closing. Since the apartment would be divided into two units, the shares in the condop needed to be reallocated, a process that involved the buyers’ lawyers and the board. The apartments also needed to be divided before the sale could close. Every step in the reconfiguration of the unit required approvals, a process that involved lawyers, architects, appraisers, contractors and electricians.

“I remember constantly being on the phone with Joanna and my attorney,” Robin Geisler, 38, a stay-at-home mother, said. “We were trying to be creative — what can we do if this doesn’t work? It was all so emotional.” Adam Geisler, 42, is an executive at a sports company.

After two months, the kinks were worked out and the sale closed. The Geislers sold their third-floor unit with a large terrace for $1.825 million and then bought the $3.025 million four-bedroom with Benigno, paying roughly two-thirds of the sale price. They split the $20,000 cost of dividing the unit evenly.

The seller had to tolerate a longer and more complicated closing than he might have otherwise, but he avoided having to stage his apartment for sale. And since both buyers already owned homes in the building, chances of a board rejection were lower than with a stranger. For these reasons, Benigno said, he was willing to wait.

Now, with Benigno living next door, the two mothers help each other with child care and often joke that they should have left a passageway open between the two apartments so the children could easily travel back and forth. “Our girls are best friends,” Geisler said. “Sometimes I’ll look down and say, ‘Oh! I’m feeding another one tonight’ — it’s great for both of us.”

Not all potential buyers want to expand into the apartment next door. Sometimes they just covet that apartment.

Consider Thomas and Jerrica Kelly. They liked the one-bedroom apartment they owned on the seventh floor of a large co-op in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. But they liked their next-door neighbors’ two-bedroom, with a larger kitchen and city views, even better. “We loved their setup,” said Thomas Kelly, 33, a director at the Sean Kelly Gallery in Hudson Yards, which is owned by his father. “It has much a more open layout.”

In 2017, the Kellys weren’t thinking about trading up; they were busy planning a honeymoon in Italy. But when they learned that the couple next door was moving out of state, “We were like, ‘Forget the trip,'” said Jerrica Kelly, 32, an executive assistant at Master &amp; Dynamic, a luxury headphone company.

They wanted to make an offer before their neighbors listed the apartment. So, they asked Nichole Thompson-Adams, the Compass saleswoman who had sold them their first apartment, for her opinion. With her advice, their offer of $825,000 was accepted and they listed their own apartment.

Coincidentally, the Kellys weren’t the only people in the co-op looking to move. On the first floor, Erissa Scalera and Nick Divers were renting a one-bedroom and had been looking to buy a unit in the building for several months, getting outbid on an earlier offer. Then they went to an open house in a seventh-floor apartment where they noticed photographs of the Kellys, a couple they already knew from walking their dogs.

Later that day, Divers was out walking his dog when he ran into Thomas Kelly and mentioned that he had seen his apartment. “I didn’t want to make him feel any pressure,” Divers, 33, a film editor, said. “But I wanted him to be aware that we were interested so that when the offer came in, he would know that it was coming from us.”

Few people get to choose their next-door neighbors, but the Kellys were a rare exception. They received multiple offers and chose the one that Divers and Scalera made largely because they already knew them. “We felt really comfortable with them because we like them,” Jerrica Kelly said. And “if we’re going to be here a long time, we better like the neighbors.” Divers and Scalera bought the Kellys’ apartment for $660,000.

As the closing date approached, Divers and Scalera experienced another upside to buying from a neighbor: They could swing by, take measurements of rooms and get information about the apartment’s quirks, like the finicky refrigerator. Thompson-Adams, who listed the Kellys’ apartment, and Sam Gogolak, a Compass salesman who represented Divers and Scalera, urged the couples to keep the communication channels formal. But neither party listened.

“It was hard for us to not go rogue and handle it on our own,” said Scalera, 33, who works for the Rockefeller Foundation. “You’re already neighbors; there’s already that kind of familiarity.”

The Kellys, who are expecting their first child early next year, now see the timing as fortuitous — they do not have to apartment-hunt while Jerrica Kelly is pregnant. Their honeymoon, they said, will have to wait.

Now that the couples are next-door neighbors, they’ve become friends. Divers and Scalera made significant renovations to the apartment, turning the dining room into a second bedroom to make space for their baby daughter. When the Kellys visit, they hardly remember their old home. Jerrica Kelly said, “It feels like we never lived there.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/realestate/hey-neighbor-can-i-buy-your-apartment.html" id="38f4d3cb-1b66-3237-ab44-998129e319ce">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — A quarter century is a long time, but some things are worth the wait, and Michael Faillace, who lives on the Upper East Side, knew that his neighbor’s one-bedroom apartment was one of those things.

Hey Neighbor, Can I Buy Your Apartment?

“This Old House,” which began chronicling home renovations in 1979, was one of the first such shows to air on national television and arguably helped create the DIY nation we all live in.

“It’s like cooking,” said Vila, who is now 73 and spends his time sitting on the boards of various nonprofits, living mostly in Palm Beach, Florida, and occasionally on the Upper East Side and Martha’s Vineyard.

Say you want to rip out your bathroom linoleum and replace it with ceramic tile. First, maybe you get inspiration from TV; next, you binge a bunch of random YouTube videos or find a how-to video on ThisOldHouse.com or Vila’s website, BobVila.com. Armed with your shopping list, you head to the store, get your ingredients, come home and lose a weekend laying a floor.

“At the end of the project, you’re a hero,” Vila said.

Four decades after Vila and the rest of the original “This Old House” crew introduced viewers to the concept of watching contractors turn tired homes into pretty ones, knocking down walls is big entertainment. “This Old House” is a powerful brand with a magazine, a website and a spinoff, “Ask This Old House.”

The show’s creator, Russell Morash, whose credits include “The French Chef” with Julia Child and “The Victory Garden,” was crowned the “father of how-to television” by the National Academy of Television Arts &amp; Sciences when it awarded him a lifetime achievement Emmy in 2014. His brand of educational television paved the way for a genre of reality TV centered on what would otherwise be mundane tasks.

Now the competition is stiff. Renovation-hungry viewers can tune in 24 hours a day to HGTV’s endless loop of angst-ridden shows, including “Love It or List It” and “Flip or Flop.” Other networks, including Bravo, have their own high-drama renovation lineups, with shows like “Buying It Blind” and “Flipping Exes.”

But “This Old House” didn’t originally follow the formula of the anxious homeowner saved by a crew of knowledgeable tradesmen that has come to define the genre. Its first season, which aired on WGBH Boston, a local public television station, had no homeowner at all. Instead, it chronicled the restoration of a vacant and dilapidated Victorian house in Dorchester, Massachusetts, that the station bought and later sold. PBS picked up the unlikely hit show the following season, and in 1982, producers featured a homeowner restoring a Greek Revival house in Arlington, Massachusetts. After that, the formula took hold.

To find the right house, the show accepts proposals from homeowners, architects and builders, selecting homes based on the scope of work, budget, timing, style and location. (Vila said that Morash particularly liked houses in warmer places, like Santa Barbara, California, where a winter spent on location would be more appealing than in cold New England.)

There have been changes over the years. Scenes are shorter, and features like “sweat equity,” where homeowners strap on a tool belt and get to work, add drama.

The houses are different, too. One Rhode Island house featured in 2018 was described as an “idea house,” with vacation-focused elements like a plunge pool, barbecue station and outdoor shower.

But despite the competition from flashier cable TV shows, “This Old House” has largely stuck to its formula, with a cast that includes members from 1979 who still work on one house over multiple episodes.

And it’s a formula that continues to work. In the first quarter of 2019, “This Old House” reached 2.043 million households, and “Ask This Old House” reached 1.876 million households, making them the two top-rated shows in their category, beating HGTV’s entire lineup, according to Nielsen data provided by “This Old House.”

“What HGTV is doing is great, but we look at this content in a different manner. We don’t redo a house in one episode,” said Dan Suratt, chief executive of This Old House Ventures. “People want that level of detail, and that’s what’s lacking in the other shows.”

In other words, rather than a 30-second shot referring to insulation, “This Old House” viewers get an in-depth primer on choosing and installing it.

Vila, who left the show in 1989 over a dispute about his celebrity endorsements, could be credited with creating the handyman-hero aesthetic: the rumpled, but somehow polished workman in a flannel shirt, jeans and work boots. That uniform has come to be synonymous with home improvement television, with variations worn by current HGTV stars like Jonathan Scott of “Property Brothers” and Chip Gaines of “Fixer Upper.”

“Bob inspired an entire generation of industry professionals — I was one of them,” said Gaines, who is starting a new TV network in 2020 to replace Discovery’s DIY Network, with his wife, Joanna Gaines. “He single-handedly shifted the narrative of an age-old trade.”

By the 1990s, Vila had his own show, “At Home with Bob Vila,” and was making periodic cameos on the sitcom “Home Improvement,” where Tim Allen played the fictional host of a show called “Tool Time” and Vila played his rival.

To celebrate the longevity of “This Old House,” PBS recently turned an Upper West Side brownstone into a temporary set for an anniversary special that will air next month and that brings Vila together for the first time with his successors, Kevin O’Connor, the show’s current host, and Steve Thomas, the host from 1989 to 2003, for a round-table discussion. The show will also include interviews with past homeowners and footage from some of the episodes.

O’Connor, a former banker who was tapped to be the show’s host after impressing the producers when he and his wife, Kathleen, appeared as homeowners on an episode of “Ask This Old House,” said he saw the hunger for fix-it-up programming continuing to grow.

“If you’re spending 30% of your time watching home improvement, you’re going to catch the bug; you’re going to get an interest,” O’Connor, 51, said. Finish watching an episode, he added, and “you can fire up YouTube and figure out how to build a deck.”

Thomas, who became the host of the show after producers noticed his book and documentary about learning to sail in Micronesia, is less enthusiastic about DIY mania. “The guys on YouTube may or may not be smoking crack,” he said. “You get incorrect, inaccurate and basically bad information on YouTube.”

Thomas, 66, now lives in Port Clyde, Maine, and is still renovating houses, including two adjacent cottages on Hupper Island that he sold to Chief Justice John Roberts, the first in 2006 and the second in 2016.

Unlike many shows, “This Old House” has never shied away from the grittier bits of home renovation. In the final episode of the 2017 renovation of a home in Newton, Massachusetts, Richard Trethewey, the show’s plumbing and heating expert since 1980, showcased a new heating system, explaining in detail how the heat pumps, air handlers and refrigerant lines worked.

The highlight of the scene was new radiant heating — in the garage, of all places. “This place will be comfortable for years to come,” he told viewers.

Later in the episode, Liz McQuillan Delfino, the homeowner, showed off what would have been the highlight on any other show: the new kitchen, with an island made of reclaimed oak from an Ohio barn, a sliding barn door for the pantry and a tile depicting the goddess Fortuna on the wall behind the stove.

“She stands on a ball, and her cloak waves in the wind, and you never know if you’re going to get good luck or bad luck,” said Delfino, 37, who grew up in the house, inheriting it from her mother, and now lives there with her husband, Joe Delfino, 37, and their two children.

Yet even from the start, “This Old House” wasn’t entirely about boilers and knob-and-tube wiring. It has long dabbled in the celebrity cameo.

In an episode that aired on New Year’s Eve in 1983, Vila visited the new Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan, with Ivana Trump providing a tour of a model apartment. Wearing a royal blue dress draped with a scarf, she pointed out the mirrored walls, lacquered finishes and a mural with 24-karat gold details. “As you can see, all our clientele are black-tie people, very sophisticated people, and this is the feel that they like,” Trump said.

“Ivana has this marvelous accent and was this beautiful woman,” Vila recalled. “She kept saying, ‘onyx, gold, silk.’ I’ve never forgotten it.”

A young Donald Trump then walked Vila through the atrium, explaining the scope of his investment. “When you’re going to spend the kind of money that we’ve spent — where we’ve spent for the finest marble, for the finest bronze, for the finest everything else — you have to be careful,” Trump told him.

Vila remembers being underwhelmed by his encounter with the future president. “How shall I put it without being castigated?” he said. “It was not exciting television.”

Over the years, dozens of homes have gotten the “This Old House” treatment. And for some of those homeowners, like Terry and Sima Maitland, the experience of a season spent on television was as memorable as the improvements themselves.

In the early 1990s, the couple and their three children were living in a cramped 1710 house in Acton, Massachusetts, with oddly shaped rooms, virtually no closets and a tiny kitchen in need of new appliances. Also, the pipes repeatedly froze, bricks were crumbling and falling into the chimney flues, and the only bathtub would not drain.

“We always had this fantasy that ‘This Old House’ was going to come and save us,” recalled Terry Maitland, 71, a real estate broker who still lives in the house with Sima Maitland, also 71, a retired teacher.

So the Maitlands sent the show a letter, begging for help. Eventually, a producer called, and then a location scout paid them a visit. Their $150,000 renovation became a subject of the 1994 season. Like other homeowners featured on the show, the Maitlands paid for the renovation, but they got deeply discounted materials from companies angling for a mention of their products, resulting in a higher-end renovation than they would have had otherwise.

The season chronicled Tom Silva, the show’s longtime general contractor, building an addition that expanded the house from 2,200 square feet to 3,400. The addition made room for a new kitchen, family room, laundry room, powder room and a master suite with a bathroom.

“There was a certain team spirit between Tommy and the producers,” Maitland said. “It was very collegial.”

The family became local celebrities. For years, tourists from as far away as Kansas and Minnesota drove up the driveway to photograph the restored house. One fan sent a tool belt to the school where Sima Maitland worked, asking if Norm Abram, the show’s master carpenter, could sign it. (He did.)

During the months those episodes aired, the couple were accosted by locals with strong opinions. A shopper at a paint store once stopped Maitland to tell her to hold her ground about an on-air dispute regarding kitchen cabinets materials.

“Somebody said, ‘I know who you are! Don’t let them push you around. Get your cherry cabinets,’” Maitland recalled. “The guys on the show used to call it public takedowns.” (Sima Maitland got her cherry cabinets.)

Twenty-five years later, the Maitlands have made few changes to the house. “Still, every time I come up the driveway I can’t believe we live here,” Terry Maitland said.

Not all the show’s guests have been eager participants. David and Janet McCue knew little about the show and had no interest in appearing on it when they were approached in 2001 by Thomas, a member of their yacht club. A mutual friend introduced them, telling Thomas that the McCues were planning to restore their 1883 shingled waterfront house in Manchester, Massachusetts, which had been stripped of much of its character during a previous renovation.

“It looked like a motor hotel in Hyannis,” said David McCue, 65, the founder of McCue Corp., a safety equipment manufacturer. (Janet McCue, now 60, who worked in the fashion industry, is retired.)

Initially, David McCue rejected the offer, as the couple had already renovated five homes and had no interest in doing this one publicly. “I can’t imagine doing this on TV,” he remembers thinking. “I wouldn’t want a camera in my face.”

Then a producer paid them a visit. “He was utterly charming, and our ‘no’ went to ‘maybe,’ ” David McCue said. The next day, the McCues received a delivery: a box of videotapes of past episodes, with a note that said “homework.”

Soon after, the McCues met with Morash and Silva, and were finally persuaded. “Russ was known as awfully crotchety. But I didn’t mind; I grew up in England with crotchety people,” David McCue said. “I thought he was great and authentic and real and didn’t mince words.”

And so the McCues agreed to chronicle their $2.1 million renovation on air, restoring the house to its 19th-century grandeur, rebuilding porches and dormers, adding a music room, an art studio, an open kitchen and two-story windows to the foyer.

The 7,100-square-foot house is now on the market for $9.75 million. One of the selling points: It was rebuilt by Silva of “This Old House.”

Like the other homes featured on the show, the McCue house became a character in its own right, with a story that bound its history to its future. “The house is, in many ways, the most important character on the show,” Vila said.

While filming a 40th anniversary special for “This Old House” recently, Bob Vila, the show’s original host, stopped to consider why, after all these years, people still can’t seem to get enough of home improvement shows.

Ronda Kaysen

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