Thursday, May 17, 2007

The Dream of Absolute Quiet

By PENELOPE GREEN; Published: May 17, 2007

JONATHAN PRAGER is a 40-something Manhattan comedian and singer whose life experience and worldview, like those of many other comedians, are semitragic. Certainly, his quest to find a quiet home has been laced with pathos.

His last apartment, he said, was a living hell. He could hear the squeak of his neighbors’ faucets, the ring of their phone and the clatter of the plastic marbles their child would drop on the floor.

But Mr. Prager is made raw by all manner of city noises, from the squeal of a bus’s brakes to the bell the subway door makes when it closes (let’s not even talk about its brakes), from a jackhammer’s drill to the gum-chewing of the couple behind him at “The Drowsy Chaperone” the other night.

(He has a house in Connecticut, but he said he found no peace there, either. There are lawn mowers and leaf blowers and a neighbor’s pool with a noisy filter.)

“I’m sensitive to noise, emotions, electromagnetic vibrations,” he said. “You name it, I’m sensitive to it.”

In searching for a new apartment, he confounded brokers, he said, by rejecting sweeping city views or abundant light because he could discern the sound of the place’s elevator or the whir of rooftop equipment. He vetted his new home in a new building on the Lower East Side by wheedling his way past the super on successive visits to “just lie on the floor and feel and hear what it’s really like there.”

Broker-attended visits are easier, but brokers are always on their cellphones, he explained. This apartment is free of upstairs neighbors, by virtue of being on the top floor. Yet despite his due diligence, some issues have arisen since he moved in a few weeks ago.

“There are vents in the hallways through which air is sucked,” he said, “and that sucking noise is pretty loud.” And the construction work down the block is louder than he had imagined.

He has worked his way in and out of solutions: CitiQuiet, a New York sound-insulating window company, gave him an estimate for his floor-to-ceiling windows that came in at $10,000, rather steep for a rental. Then he consulted Mason Wyatt, a deep-voiced Southerner with a noise treatment practice called City Soundproofing, who cautioned against a full-on sound isolation package, again, because the place is a rental. Instead, he suggested his Silent Pictures, acoustical panels that can be hung on a wall like art, which start at $20 a square foot.

“But my girlfriend was like, ‘We don’t want pieces of fabric-covered wallboard on the wall,’ ” said Mr. Prager, who paid Mr. Wyatt $300 for a consultation.

Like many before him, Mr. Prager was learning that domestic sonic bliss might be attainable, but at a price. Quiet has always been a luxury in cities. In New York, “neighbor noise” competes with outside noise to make noise complaints the No. 1 reason people call the city’s environmental complaint line.

Today quiet is even more elusive. With dozens of new buildings still on the drawing board in Manhattan and around the country, owners of new glass condos are recoiling in horror from the sonic fallout of the next glass tower being built down the block, or the roar of traffic heard through those beautiful glass walls. (Watch for New York City’s revised noise code, in place by July 1, which will put the onus on developers “to develop a noise mitigation plan prior to commencing work,” said Natalie Millner, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.)

This is why sales of sound-insulating windows at CitiQuiet are up 50 percent from two years ago, to over 10,000 windows in the last year, said David Skudin, the company’s president, who added that he has been outfitting glass towers like the Urban Glass House and the Bloomberg Building for wigged-out new residents.

And quiet is now the consummate domestic prize in the ever-expanding exurbs, where family members rattling around in cavernous great rooms and pursuing separate amusements — their TiVo’d movies, their pinging Xboxes, their YouTube-blaring computers — are driving one another crazy.

Ethnographers at Owens Corning have noted that families in new homes are “having more stress and changing their lifestyles as a result of all the interior noise,” said Harry Alter, a senior engineer at the Owens Corning science and technology center, explaining why his company cannily created and began marketing insulation products last year under the name Quietzone Noise Control Solutions. (Their trademarked slogan: “Volume control for the home.”)

“You had moms that would go into a bedroom closet to read a book,” said Portia Ash, the business manager for residential noise control at Owens Corning. “People with home theaters who couldn’t use them after certain hours because the kids were asleep. People who were working at home who were relegating their kids to the basement so their noise wouldn’t interfere with their ability to conduct business.”

These days new houses are noisier than ever, she concluded, because of their open floor plans, the abundance of hardwood floors and minimal carpeting.

The larger and more elaborate they are, the louder they get. Not only are there more activity rooms packed into them, from home theaters to bowling alleys to kickboxing studios (and who among us wants to hear the thwack of a foot against a punching bag at 6 a.m.?), they also run on the sort of powerful — and noisy — commercial systems that municipal buildings do.

Naturally, owners of houses like these can afford to avail themselves of the very latest in sonic technology.

Let’s examine one very, very large shingle-and-granite-faced house nearing completion on the North Shore of Long Island. It has all the usual flourishes: a sweetheart staircase with a 1,550-gallon fish tank behind it, a Ping-Pong room with a coffered ceiling, a model train room, a shooting gallery, a fencing room, a gym, a theater and a grotto. And, except for that grotto, each of its 30-odd rooms has been engineered for acoustical privacy, a fancy phrase that means quiet.

Last week Jim Gerold, the house’s contractor, and Steve Haas, its acoustician, described Mr. Haas’s “treatments”: the sound-absorbing plaster systems; the lead-lined Sheetrock and plywood (and the rubber clips and braces that “float” them); the fiberglass-lined ducts; and the range of resilient ceiling materials. Not that you could see any of these things.

“When I do my job well, nobody notices,” said Mr. Haas, who speaks quite softly and whose initials spell “SH.” He was wearing a dark gray shirt, dark gray pants and a dark gray silk tie with an airbrushed image of a saxophone on it. Mr. Haas’s background is as a designer of museum and performance space acoustics. For the past four years, however, his company, SH Acoustics, based in Milford, Conn., has focused on high-end houses like the one in Long Island, tweaking their many rooms to tame — this is a favorite word of his — the sound within them so that their owners no longer have to hear water rushing through pipes, toilets flushing, children running, televisions droning or anything else they would rather not.

Mr. Haas said his company is growing by about 30 percent a year and is now working on about 100 residences, including a 55,000-square-foot house in Australia. His costs, he said, could be anywhere from a few hundred dollars (to soundproof a wall) to six figures, as is the case for the Long Island house.

“For those who want all aspects of their new home conditioned for sound, plan on a 3 to 5 percent upgrade in the total cost of your home,” he said. “It helps if people can prioritize, like, ‘I want my bedroom to be a haven’ or ‘I want this home from start to finish to be quiet.’ “

While a decorator creates an aesthetic ambiance, Mr. Haas and others like him work on a house’s sonic ambiance, making sure that conversation in a living room, for instance, is not too bouncy or “live” — too much like a noisy restaurant, for example. “Restaurant quality,” he said, making air quotes. “We don’t want that.”

Nature can be noisy, too. Years ago Jeffrey Collé, another contractor who works on Long Island, was asked if he could eliminate the sound of the ocean in the house he was renovating in East Hampton. He had been working with Billy Joel on his sound studio on Shelter Island and had learned a few things about acoustics.

“I applied the knowledge I’d had from Billy’s studio,” said Mr. Collé, who staggered studs, deployed a lot of lead-filled drywall and made windows using double-plated glass framed with Honduras mahogany. “But I wasn’t sure what the result was going to be until the end. And the bottom line was, you couldn’t hear the ocean.

“My favorite thing to do was to bring people to the house — it was all glass and the ocean was right there — and they would get this look on their face because you couldn’t hear anything. They knew something was different but couldn’t figure it out until I opened the doors to the roar of the surf. Then they got it.”

Anthony Grimani is the president of Performance Media Industries, in Fairfax, Calif., an acoustical engineering company. “I do think people have the right to live in places that have good sound privacy,” he said. “Especially high-end residences.”

He added, “When we’re working on the home theater I always ask: What about the rest of your residence? Does it have a comfortable feel sonically? I think people are more aware than they were 10 years ago,” but they don’t realize that without acoustic enhancements, “things aren’t going to be quiet, no matter how classy the place is.”

The cost of sound treatment adds $3,000 to $4,000 a room, Mr. Grimani said. “But that’s in a new house, while you’re building. It costs an arm or a leg if you fix it later.”

Acoustical privacy is an investment in mental health, he suggested, offering an evolutionary rationale. “You hear something, and flight or fight kicks in,” he said, “and you wonder what or who is creeping up behind you. You think, ‘Is it going to eat me, should I run?’ Sound is putting you in an evaluating condition all the time, and I would say that’s no way to live.”

It may also be that quiet is a moving target, and that what’s annoying and what’s pleasurable comes down to what’s in or out of your control.

Mr. Prager, the comedian, tells jokes about how the sound of hard candy being unwrapped makes him crazy and why a white-noise machine could never be a tolerable remedy for what ails him.

“I have jokes about that,” he said, “because you know how they use those in therapists’ offices? I have to ask the therapist to turn them off, along with their computers — there’s a little fan inside most computers that goes on and that’s annoying — and their air-conditioners. And then I can’t concentrate because there is always construction noise.”

Construction, he said, follows him around.

Mr. Prager has suffered deeply because of his sonic aversions. Relationships are complicated, he said (though it must be noted that his current relationship is a year old), and he ticked off some reasons: “Music playing in the house or a car makes me agitated,” he said. “I have to leave the house if my girlfriend blow-dries her hair. And it’s hard for me to go to restaurants because if I’m next to people who are screaming or laughing I can’t tune it out, and have to move tables, and that can be very annoying to the person I’m with.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Prager has just decided, in defiance of his own inclinations as well as a national trend toward obsessive quiet mongering, to learn to live with the noise.

“My girlfriend said, ‘If you can learn to adapt it will make your life better,’ ” he said. “She said, ‘This is not a silent world and you’ve got to learn to function with noise around.’ “

And he really likes his new apartment.

Fingers in the Ears Are the Last Refuge

DO-IT-YOURSELFERS can tweak their sonic ambience in a few ways, said Steve Haas, the president of SH Acoustics, an acoustical engineering concern in Connecticut. But first the problem needs a proper diagnosis.

If sound in the room is echo-y — or “bouncy,” as Mr. Haas said, using a layman’s term for “reverberating” — that signifies an in-room treatment issue.

“Basically you need a way to stop the sound from reflecting around,” Mr. Haas said. Hard surfaces like bare walls, wood floors and sleek modern furniture reflect sound. “You need sound-absorbing material,” he said, “and that can take many forms.” Consider reworking the décor from midcentury modern to English country. Rugs are a good idea (wall-to-wall carpet being the most effective). For truly cavernous spaces, you can break up the sound with “funky chandeliers or hanging light fixtures,” he said.

To prevent room-to-room sound transmission, Mr. Haas said, it’s important to seal holes and gaps in and around walls with acoustic caulking that stays pliable. The best thing to do, he added, “is think about adding another layer of standard drywall to a wall or ceiling, or for further improvement, buying a special acoustic drywall called QuietRock that is engineered to damp sound vibrations.”

“What doesn’t work is putting fiberglass panels on a wall,” he said. “That only treats the sound in the room.”

Photo Illustration by Josef Astor

 

Silencing the Home: Not a Simple Business
Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times
Steve Haas, an acoustician, is using technology to create a sonic retreat in this Fifth Avenue apartment.
Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
Mr. Prager eschewed Mason Wyatt’s remedy, acoustical wall panels called Silent Pictures, right, and has decided to try to live with the noise in his new apartment.

 

Posted by M at 20:13:34 | Permalink | No Comments »

One landmark, four visions

Eastern Columbia Lofts

RORY CUNNINGHAM, president of the Art Deco Society of L.A., called it one of the premier Deco buildings in the country. Revered historian Robert Winter said it’s a shining example of Southern California’s golden age of architecture.

Times critic Christopher Hawthorne recently declared it “one of the most beautiful pieces of architecture in the city, a building that would be world-famous if it were located in Manhattan or San Francisco.” To about 100 Angelenos, however, the Eastern Columbia building is even more. It’s home.

After two years and a reported $80-million renovation, the Kor Group has reopened the historic retail and office tower as 147 lofts. Original terra cotta tiles — a mix of sea-foam green and cerulean blue that a 1930 Times story characterized as “melting turquoise” — have been restored. The terrazzo floor of the building’s old shopping arcade has been painstakingly repaired for a new Kelly Wearstler-designed lobby. But what are all those newly minted urbanites doing with their lofts?


We peeked into four units, all owned by first-time home buyers who are taking dramatically different approaches to their interiors. Whether Deco or Zen, modern or traditional, all four spaces reflect the joys — and the challenges — of living in a landmark.

— Nancy Yoshihara and Craig Nakano

Geoff Clark mixes modern and vintage décor for a sleekly classic interior

Geoff Clark’s pad plays out like an ode to every romantic notion of what loft living can be: open, airy, distinctly modern and very, very cool.

The ceiling and walls — originally a fickle putty color that leaned toward green, gray or brown depending on the light — now glow a crisp, clean white. Windows wrapping the corner unit allow the sun to flood in, bouncing off the floor and turning the condo into a 1,390-square-foot light box that seems to float above Broadway.

“I just wanted a very cool, tranquil space,” Clark says to the electro-lounge beats of Thievery Corporation on his sound system. “The building is so ornate, I didn’t want an ornate unit. I wanted a neutral interior that complemented the exterior. I wanted that classic loft feel.”

Indeed, Clark’s mix of modern and vintage seems right at home on the sleek concrete floor. Two low-slung B&B Italia Metropolitan armchairs complement a classic Warren Platner coffee table that he scored from a Palm Springs consignment shop. Contemporary pieces such as Kartell’s translucent Bourgie lamp and a Philippe Starck-designed Mademoiselle chair with transparent legs blend seamlessly with a funky red floor lamp and cast-concrete cactus planter. A wall sculpture made of rusted railroad spikes seems appropriately industrial and refined at the same time.

The vibe is young yet grown-up, classic but not cliché. The decor, much like the building itself, gives a nod to the past but lives in the present. It’s the kind of space that feels perpetually primed for a cocktail party, though Clark says no parties — not yet. “Just a few Friday-drinks-at-the-pool kind of deal,” he says with a smile.

Before he moved from Laurel Canyon, he says, “One thing people said to me was, ‘No one is going to see you.’ But it’s like I have a waiting list. Now friends want to come downtown.”

From his perch on the seventh floor, the longtime architecture buff can see the landmark marquee of the 1926 Orpheum Theatre, not to mention the other facades of downtown’s historic core. “I can just sit and look at these buildings forever,” he says, waving his finger toward Broadway from a blue sofa pushed up to the windows.

Clark considered buying a condo in West Hollywood but decided the Eastern Columbia would deliver something special, “a sense of excitement every time you walk in the door.”

Turns out he doesn’t even need to do that. On the drive home from work, eventually that blue and gold clock tower always pops into view. “I’ll see it and think, ‘Oh, my God. I live there.’ “

A modern loft softened by silk, light and calla lilies

If there can be such a thing as a glam Zen retreat, Nichol Bradford has tried to create it. As she lounges on a mirrored daybed, the scent of incense and calming music from the Bodhi Tree Bookstore fill the air. Beneath her feet is her ultimate vision of nirvana: a chocolate-hued concrete floor, color-matched to a Hershey’s bar. “It looks like a fudge cake,” Bradford says. “I love it.”

The condo’s exposed ventilation duct, all-stainless kitchen cabinetry and other elements of industrial chic have been softened by simple touches: the delicate lines of cut calla lilies from the wholesale flower market a few blocks away, the billowy lengths of golden silk draped here and there, even the late afternoon sun that showers the bedroom with saffron light.

“I love modern, but I don’t think I could do it and it not feel like a guy’s place,” she says.

Her parakeets — Millet, Bella and Squeak — seem just as content in their new home, a cage with views of downtown’s skyscrapers.

Bradford, who devises corporate strategy for a video game company, was renting in Hollywood before moving to the Eastern Columbia. Like many of her neighbors, she bought her unit sight unseen, before construction was completed, driven purely by “faith and intuition.”

Though she was drawn to the building’s Zigzag Moderne style of Deco, she hasn’t felt confined by it.

Whereas some neighbors have hung period-correct wallpaper and light fixtures, Bradford invested her time wrangling a 12-foot ficus to the 10th floor, where its canopy adds a glimpse of nature in a most unexpected setting.

She says a 9-foot-tall oak door salvaged from the old Getty Villa will be turned into a dining table, and still-to-be-hung graphic prints will chronicle Africans living outside Africa in the era before slavery.

It all makes for a style that Bradford struggles to define at first, but then she settles on a fitting label: “my genie bottle.”

Not scary; just a refined sense of Deco irreverence

It’s fitting that horror film director Jeremy Kasten’s unit feels a bit like a movie set: an elegant Art Deco smoking lounge circa 1930, the mohair-upholstered sofa set under the gaze of a mounted deer and a pronghorn.

Gold chevrons shimmer off the Bradbury & Bradbury Art Wallpaper under the chair rail. Wood floors reflect the soft light cast from vintage lamps.

“This is a more dialed down and mature look for me,” says Kasten, whose new movie, “The Thirst,” was released this week on DVD.

Dressed in a blue blazer with a white pocket square, the self-described Deco fanatic says he took his design cues from the historic building. He sees Deco as man and nature merged. “It’s delicate and very masculine at the same time.”

It’s also an era that works well with Kasten’s eclectic antiques collection displayed throughout his one-bedroom, 880-square-foot unit on the mezzanine, which originally was part of the building’s retail arcade. He wanted to recapture that arcade feeling with the ambience of an old-fashioned store.

In just 16 days, Kasten and interior designer Shannon Ggem, totally transformed the unit, which has only two windows.

“Most people want lots of windows,” Kasten says. “For me, I just want walls — lots of wall space.” That gives him more places to mount his collection of artwork originally made for the covers of pulp novels. “Most of the things I had but never thought they could come together.”

Their biggest design challenge was the low structural crossbeam between the kitchen and living area. The solution: hang an old jeweler’s sign that Kasten bought for $50 from the back of an antiques shop in New Orleans when he was 21 and driving to L.A. from Baltimore.

The Deco sofa and two matching chairs were maroon when Kasten received them from a friend, then were reupholstered in crème and black mohair. Matching lamps came from opposite coasts: a New York flea market and a yard sale in the California desert. A chest with a mirrored pullout bar was a gift from his mother.

In the kitchen, Ggem replaced the developer’s standard kitchen pendant with a Deco-esque fixture purchased at an estate sale. To add a little more period flavor without much added expense, Kasten painted a chevron pattern on the bathroom floor and gold detailing on the ceramic tile above the living-room windows.

Backless, custom shelves create a beehive-shaped entrance from the kitchen to the bedroom, where 300 vintage ties are displayed as wall decor. Placed carefully on the shelves: antique “Wizard of Oz” books, ruby slippers, 1930s nude female figurines collected from around the world, kitschy taxidermy and books whose spines sport titles such as “Eaten Alive: Italian Cannibal and Zombie Movies” and “Mr. T on Mr. T.”

Kasten has long admired the Eastern Columbia, and his decorative mementos include vintage postcards of the building framed and hung in the kitchen. He turned a 1931 coin commemorating the building into his keychain. All were bought on EBay. “There’s a mapable history to this place,” says Kasten, who moved from Venice with his 28-pound cat, Flipper.

During the decorating process, his instinct was to fill the space with his abundant tchotchkes. Ggem, ever the diplomat, would politely suggest, “Let’s just try this in the storage unit for a while.”

Kasten says his housewarming party three weeks ago was the first time he’s ever been nervous that someone would break something. But all went off just fine. His guests even helped to clean up. What did his friends think of his new pad? “Everyone said it’s so me.”

‘Casual sophisticate’ décor around a vintage baby grand piano

PAUL GONZALEZ is in a bit of a design quandary.

He’s not happy with his new couch — neither the Easter egg blue color nor the Naugahyde covering he specially selected for his cat, Cleo, who rarely sits on the thing. “This couch would have been perfect in the Jetsons’ house,” quips Gonzalez, who spent last weekend arranging to have it reupholstered in a latte-colored fabric.

Describing his second-floor studio as a work in progress, Gonzalez says he drew on the building’s interior public spaces, designed by Kelly Wearstler, for inspiration. “Many of my loft’s interior design choices were taken from the lobby of the building. I wanted my loft to flow from the lobby and interior of the building.”

Venetian plaster lines the entryway, where the interior doorway is framed in black marble. The charcoal gray of the concrete floor is the same shade as part of the lobby floor.

Gonzalez consulted with four interior designers, but the inspiration for his traditional furniture came from his mother. The Steinway & Sons baby grand piano that she received as a birthday present in 1942 now graces his loft.

“When I was a kid, the piano was always in the house,” he says. “I love the color of the wood and curves of the piano. Everything is built around the piano.”

A clothes-filled, mahogany, Ralph Lauren armoire, crucial in a space with no closets, stands to one side of the piano near his sleigh bed from Henredon. Across the way is another armoire, by Ethan Allen, that hides his computer. Near his kitchen is a round table that he found at Interior Devine in Pasadena.

Gonzalez is mixing these traditional pieces with modern bar stools, lighting fixtures and art. He calls his style “casual sophisticate.” Canvases by New Orleans painter David Harouni line the wall adjacent to windows that look into the treetops on 9th Street — a welcome bit of green for a man who rented in leafy Pasadena for 20 years. He uses the building’s up-lights outside his windows as planters.

“Home in downtown has to be soothing because it is your sanctuary,” says Gonzalez, who walks three blocks to his office at AT&T. “This where you restore, reenergize.”

Posted by M at 20:10:42 | Permalink | No Comments »

Lawsuit Over Water Service Is Dismissed

City Says Fairfax Infringes on Sales

By Bill Turque Thursday, May 17, 2007; Page B06 Washington Post Staff Writer

A federal judge yesterday threw out a lawsuit filed by the City of Falls Church charging that Fairfax County’s water utility was improperly offering service to new customers in areas traditionally served by the city.

The ruling, which clears the way for the county to sell its water more widely, deals a potentially serious blow to the finances of the city of 11,000.

Falls Church depends heavily on revenue from its water system, which serves more than 34,000 businesses and homes, most of them in the surrounding county. Critics have contended, however, that the city unfairly subsidizes low property tax rates for its homeowners by selling high-priced water.

For decades, Falls Church has purchased water from the Washington Aqueduct, operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, for sale beyond its boundaries, including areas such as Tysons Corner and Dunn Loring. In February, the city sued Fairfax Water, formerly the Fairfax County Water Authority, alleging that it contacted the developer of a major residential project near the Dunn Loring-Merrifield Metro station about providing water service.

Falls Church officials argued that a series of federal laws controlling the aqueduct’s water, and a 1959 agreement with the county, give the city exclusive rights to sell service in certain parts of Fairfax. But Judge Claude M. Hilton of U.S. District Court in Alexandria said in a 15-page opinion that the government never specifically granted that privilege to Falls Church.

“Had Congress intended to grant the City of Falls Church an exclusive federal service territory in Fairfax County, it certainly knew how to say so,” Hilton wrote. “But there is nothing in any of the federal Acts upon which the City relies in support of its claim.” The agreement with the county expired in 1989, Hilton also noted.

Falls Church City Attorney Roy Thorpe said in a statement yesterday that the city was disappointed with the decision and would be reviewing its legal options. “We are prepared to defend our water system and preserve our water service area. We believe we should be able to do business as we have for the past 75 years,” Thorpe said.

The city charges $3.03 for 1,000 gallons of water, while the county charges about half that. Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Chairman Gerald E. Connolly (D) said the decision “opens the door for the Fairfax Water Authority to compete anywhere and everywhere in the county.” The city, he said, “was seeking protection from competition.” The authority serves about 1.3 million people in Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William counties and the city of Alexandria.

According to testimony and exhibits submitted by Fairfax Water attorneys, Falls Church has taken large sums out of its water system funds for general city operations. From 2000 to 2006, the city transferred an average of $4.6 million a year from the water system.

Because only 10 percent of the city’s water customers live in Falls Church, attorneys said, it meant that about 110,000 other Fairfax County rate payers were subsidizing the cost of city government.

Halsey Green, the city’s former finance director, testified that he went along with the policy of transferring water funds “but did not believe it was justified by the amount the city had invested in the system.”

Posted by M at 11:34:16 | Permalink | No Comments »