![]() We looked back to the Penthouse magazines of the 60s and 70s. We relished the idea of the project and were bouncing ideas around straight away. “Porn in those days had become tacky and a bit of a joke – it wasn’t the soft focus images of the 70s we remembered, it felt harder and a little soulless. Corinne had met the editor of Penthouse at a Vivienne Westwood party, and came home very excited telling me they had asked her to shoot for the magazine. Here, Olley, stylist Tara St Hill and hairstylist Neil Moodie revisit the series, shot over a weekend in the Welsh countryside. At its helm was Michelle Olley of Skin Two, a staple of London’s fetish press, who had been brought on board to “make porn cool” – applying the style of publications like The Face to Penthouse’s tired top shelf aesthetic.ĭespite Olley’s own good intentions, the newly revamped Penthouse didn’t last long (it ran until late 1998, while Olley herself left after four months), but it’s partly that sense of the short-lived which makes these unearthed images – the first of two shoots by Day for the magazine – so special. They emerged from a moment of late 90s optimism, a determination to reclaim the masculine gaze of pornography and reconcile it with art, beauty and the energy of London at the time. But so it was that in 1997 the renowned photographer (whose raw style blended the worlds of fashion and documentary, and would come to define an entire era of British image-making until her death in 2010) accepted a job shooting for a newly-revamped version of the soft-core mag. To think that some 40 years ago, a “neighborhood improvement activist” could buy up an entire apartment building, claim the top two floors for himself, and build a cottage on the roof - and now, even buying that assemblage for a mere $3.5 million is, it seems, a dream of the not-so-distant past.Penthouse and Corinne Day are two names you don’t expect to find in the same sentence. It’s an artifact of another era altogether. The listing mentions other things even a seasoned real-estate reporter doesn’t see every day: parquet salvaged from a London theater, walls with a specialty paint finish by Mark Chamberlain. The new listing mentions a gut renovation, and the photos show an apartment with more luxurious features than the original listing had: herringbone floors versus standard hardwood ones, full-on landscaping and brick pavers versus a terrace with potted plants, a kitchen with a Lacanche range and North Star fridge compared to the previous stainless-steel appliances and granite countertop. ![]() ![]() He wouldn’t say who bought it, but apparently they did some work. The current and former listing broker, Nick Gavin of Compass, said that there were multiple bids at the time and that it went for over ask. Back then it was asking $3.5 million - a third of its current listing price. Fixing up old things was something Shrady did often: “He never saw an old wreck of a house or boat or car that he didn’t love,” his wife wrote in his obituary. Besides being actually on top of the building, it’s rather grand in its own way - with a double-height living room in the duplex, the cottage, and a landscaped rooftop surrounding it that, at least from the listing photos, resembles something you might find in Martha’s Vineyard. While penthouse creep is a real phenomenon, with third- and fourth-floor walk-ups being marketed as such, this one lives up to the name. The last owner - Shrady’s widow - said her son lived in the cottage through college and it was rented out thereafter. The downstairs neighbor told the paper that Shrady bought the building in a decrepit and vacant state back in the 1980s, renovated it, and kept the top two floors for himself along with building the Cape Cod–style cottage on the top. ![]() It’s an unusual real-estate package dreamed up by the late Henry Merwin Shrady III, a sculptor, artist, and “neighborhood improvement activist,” according to the New York Post, which wrote about the place when Shrady’s widow first listed it back in 2017. Together the properties add up to some 3,000 square feet. The listing at 72 East 1st Street is really a two-for-one the cottage is a stand-alone studio with a kitchenette and full bathroom, but the sale also includes the top two floors of the building, a duplex with two wood-burning fireplaces (and a third gas fireplace). Except, that is, for a Cape Cod–style shingled cottage atop a red-brick building on the corner of 1st Street and First Avenue, which has just returned to the market for $9.75 million. ![]() The East Village’s gritty bohemian charm has little in common with coastal New England delights. The landscaped rooftop with the cottage, as shown in the listing photo, is part of an unusual property that also includes an apartment on the top two floors of the building. ![]()
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