There’s more than meets the eye to Joan Kron’s Upper East Side home — and a lot that does.
Times change and styles wane. But much like herself, 95-year-old Joan Kron has continually reinvented her home in Apartment 11B at 205 East 63rd Street.
How she came to reside here is hardly complicated. Ultimately, it came down to two issues still motivating New Yorkers to this day — extra space and convenient commuting. Room dimensions at 205 East 63rd were slightly larger than others they’d viewed, and the building fell within a circular range Kron had drawn where she and her then soon-to-be husband, Jerry Marder, could readily bus and walk to work, respectively. “It wasn’t a hard decision,” says Kron.
Residence 11B has since only grown, today encompassing two-and-a-half apartments. “It’s really big,” explains Corcoran agent Jane Martin. “There are infinite possibilities if the way it’s currently laid out doesn’t work for you.”
Just ask Kron, who has been reworking its floor plan for five decades. “Wherever we could, we tried to make this a very functional place that would take care of the things you have to deal with in New York apartments,” explains Kron, a humbly multidisciplinary aesthete who still works daily with seemingly little plans of slowing down.
Kron began her professional career as a costume designer — she studied the trade at Yale’s drama school — at NBC, working on programs like The Milton Berle Show. She spent 20 years in Philadelphia, where she helped introduce the City of Brotherly Love to Pop Art, working with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Indiana. In the Oxford English Dictionary, “Joan Kron” is listed (alongside co-author Suzanne Slesin) for coining the phrase “high-tech” relative to industrial-style interior design — “I picked up that term off the cutting room floor. It was a little-used term to describe prefabricated buildings.” She’s also the foremost authority on plastic surgery, having covered the subject for 25 years. And in her 80s, she directed the documentary Take My Nose… Please!, her debut feature film.
In Philadelphia, while renovating an 1860 Rittenhouse Square row house she’d bought with her first husband, Kron built an appetite for home design. It probably also didn’t hurt that she was doing so alongside friends and famed architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.
Upon moving into 11B, Kron had it remodeled by a Philly architect who built a living room environment of entirely white tile. “It was like living inside a swimming pool, and it was great,” Kron recalls.
Every iteration of the apartment grabbed headlines, with a little help from icons in their fields. Alan Buchsbaun, a style-fluid master and high-tech pioneer, had a strong hand in the home’s design. Notably, he created the primary bedroom’s atypical headboard, a freeform shape that floats above — with a floral fabric of Kron’s choosing on the wall between it and the bed — and contains reading lights within. He also took multiple colors of marble and Formica to craft an intricate built-in for the entrance gallery, an undeniably artistic work Kron considered donating to the Brooklyn Museum — would its removal not require tearing apart the apartment first.
Frederic Schwartz, an associate of Venturi and Brown known for building the Whitehall Street ferry terminal and 9/11 memorials in New Jersey and Westchester, supervised a handful of 11B reconfigurations. He helped Kron expand into the studio next door, which was then converted into a dream home office boasting large windows, ample built-in shelving, filing cabinets, and striking chain-link silver crown moldings. Those moldings are typically only found on exteriors, and they’re so thick that workers had to carry them up 11 flights of stairs simply because the elevator couldn’t accommodate them. Pro-tip from Kron: “Anybody building and furnishing in New York has to start by measuring their elevator.”
A Mott Schmidt
in Manhattan
By JEREMY KLEIN
Joan Kron’s
Kaleidoscope of Style
Apt. 11B at 205 East 63rd Street has been Kron's home of over 50 years, with many remodels along the way.
Joan Kron, photographed by Ramona Rosales.
When Kron wanted to expand her windowed kitchen, Schwartz delivered again. He sliced off part of the now-office and leveled up the galley-sized space, turning it into another area where people could gather and eat together. If that weren’t rare enough, Schwartz also added a second sink to the kitchen — at the request of Kron’s husband. Exposed to natural light, large enough for casual meals, and double the clean-up space? That’s a one-of-one NYC kitchen.
Kron’s mother lived next door to her, in 11C, for almost 15 years until her passing. Rather than assuming the costs of another unit, Kron and her neighbors subsequently split the apartment. Schwartz then turned what had been Kron’s mother’s living and dining areas into a unified dining room, still capable of seating 24 today between a formal table and a corner alcove. Kron’s main table comprises two, set end-to-end — she measured the elevator and knew one long table wouldn’t fit — designed by celebrated French architect Philippe Starck.
For the conundrum of how to merge two sets of floors into one, Kron got help from Mario Buatta, a friend from her days covering design at The New York Times and New York Magazine. Known as the “Prince of Chintz,” Buatta was an interior designer fond of floral fabrics who fashioned many an expressive, lavish room in his beyond-revered career. He conceived of hardwood floors on the diagonal, running across the open floorplan from the dining room to the living room and into the entry gallery. To make the space appear even larger, Buatta also designed a mirror that hangs on the dining room wall. “We enjoyed that room so much, and I was able to build closets at the end of it that satisfied all my storage needs — I didn’t need to have any outside storage.” Another little quirk of NYC living, among many, this home solves.
Even the bathrooms sport ingenious features. Storage woes are no more, thanks to ample medicine cabinets, including a wall of five in the primary. Half-moon cut-outs in the glass shower walls let you stick your hand through, turn the shower on, and stay worry-free about catching an unwanted cold water spray.
But Kron’s most astounding piece of home architecture is one she’ll be taking with her. In the 1970s, she needed a dining table and set out for materials in the manufacturing hub of Long Island City. Upon finding a marble yard, she was offered something perhaps no one else has: leftover white marble used to clad the Twin Towers. She took it. Atop a base of Kron’s design sits a certifiable heirloom, a round marble table from origins you could never guess by looking.
One of Kron’s favorite aspects that will remain, though, is the home’s terrace. This humble outdoor feature overlooks 63rd Street with doors connecting it to the living room and primary bedroom. It’s the type of space one can readily maximize with some creativity and a few geraniums.
Living at 205 East 63rd also means reaping the benefits of a terrific staff. Their attentiveness fosters what Kron characterizes as “the best kind of experience you could have in a building,” adding that it feels like a family. The building is small enough that you quickly learn the names of, get to know, and form relationships with everyone who works there.
Like Kron, whoever next resides in 11B has a chance to put a personal stamp on things. In particular, Martin emphasizes that the home office is a whole studio apartment and would make a fabulous primary suite if that’s what someone needs. In that spirit, take one final bit of Kron’s advice as gospel: “If you can find a way to make your home more livable, that’s one of the great pleasures of life.”
“If you can find a way to make your home more livable, that’s one of the great pleasures of life.”
“Anybody building and furnishing in New York
has to start by measuring their elevator.”
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Want to learn more?
Jane Martin
Lic. Associate RE Broker
Deanna Kory
Lic. Associate RE Broker
