By GunnyPublished: 28 January 2010 1:45 PM UTCCategories: Featured, Personalize Your Place 
We’re always on the lookout for unique artists who can help you customize your place, and Brooklyner Matt Swanston’s work may change how you see window frames.
Six years ago, Swanston was working as a theater set designer when he saw an old window laying on the ground in the West Village. Swanston “wanted to do something with it”. A passionate enthusiast for re-using and re-cycling, Matt decided to try using the window frame (glass included) as a picture frame. His first work, seen above, was to frame a poster from the Decemberists, backgrounded by glass painted with two layers of green and copper branches.
Since then, he’s done a ton of custom work for people like yourself. We calculated it, and this is 17x cooler than hanging a painting on your wall.
Give Matt something you want in a window frame and let him go to town. Prices for his custom work start at $400 — which sounds pricey until you realize that the windows themselves can cost $300, and that you’re getting something framed.
[Me Lifestyle is pure editorial. You can't buy our love.]
By RyanPublished: 28 January 2010 11:42 AM UTCCategories: Living 
The NYP reports that Alica Keys and her maybe/maybe not fiancee Swizz Beatz have purchased Lenny Kravitz’s penthouse duplex on 30 Crosby Street for $14.5 million. Kravitz has been trying to sell this penthouse for 8 years with prices ranging from $17 million to $19.5 million and now it’s down to $14.5 million. He also redesigned the pad, taking it from a funky, dark, live-like-a-rock-star look to a light and lofty I’m-just-a-regular-rich-person look. Guess Lenny was right. It ain’ t over till it’s over.
By EricPublished: 25 January 2010 6:47 PM UTCCategories: Is Now the Time to Buy? We are starting a new category of posts here on Me Lifestyle called “Is Now the Time to Buy?” We’ll be featuring a number of different opinions on the topic. These opinions will generally fall into the following 4 camps:
- Strongly positive.
- Really, really negative.
- Things are too murky to call one way or the other.
- It’s always the right time to buy if you are smart.
Our first (extreme) opinion was written by Eric Yeh of the controversial “Let Real Estate Prices Fall” Facebook page. We’re excerpting and referencing it here to kick things off on a very, well, argumentative way.
Expect posts from all 4 opinions this week. Here’s Eric:
Eric Yeh writes:
As of early January, a lot of papers and sites have been putting their positive spin on the Q4 numbers. (I won’t dignify them with a link here, but suffice to say they are the usual suspects.) I just want to remind everyone that most of American media is completely in bed with the government, and you as the informed reader must be cognizant of their deceptions to be sure they do not lead you to the wrong decisions.
FWIW, I found a much more balanced article here:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20603037&sid=ay4aZLJeKcpo
This presents a more unbiased view than some of those liberal papers/sites previously mentioned. Here are a couple of deceptive comments made by the other articles, and how they are corrected here:
1) inventories decreased BUT new developments are withholding over 6000 additional units (almost 100%!);
2) Miller was quoted out of context saying sales were high as if he were bullish BUT his specific prediction for the future is “My view is: We’re not done.”;
3) YoY declines were smaller in Q4 than Q1 BUT that is because Q408 was much worse than Q108, so the “improvement” is fake;
4) some closing prices appear high BUT “A lot of those units were bought some time ago,” according to Greg Hyme, and is also a misleading statistic.
Don’t be fooled by spin and rhetoric. Comments and statistics taken out of context can be used to support any hypothesis. Keep watching fundamentals like price:income, price:rent, and affordability, and you’ll save yourself from losing a bundle in this market.
Eric Yeh
Let Real Estate Prices Fall!
What say you?
By GunnyPublished: 21 January 2010 6:23 PM UTCCategories: Living Here’s an excerpt from New York Magazine that mentions some analogs to what we’re trying to do in real estate:
In fact, if there’s one major idea uniting every trend in the world right now, it’s that everything you wear, own, and do should be an expression of your true self. When the only difference between a “real” and a “fake” Louis Vuitton handbag is often the price, uniqueness becomes the only veritable form of luxury. This year, for instance, saw the opening of a Tribeca restaurant called Rosanjin, the first local ambassador of kaiseki—a Japanese dining concept where menus don’t exist and every course is saved in your private file, lest it be accidentally repeated on your next visit. In the perfume world, Mathilde Laurent, a famous nose who designed fragrances for Cartier, now does “custom scents” for no more than twelve clients a year, at $81,500 a pop; the process starts with a psychotherapy-style couch session wherein the client is invited to relax and recall the smells of her childhood. There’s a waiting list.
The primary difference, of course, is that we’re making home buying a highly individual, customized process for all New Yorkers, not just for the subset of our clients who can spend $81,500 on a bottle of perfume.
By GunnyPublished: 20 January 2010 5:35 PM UTCCategories: Featured, Living 
Most of us aren’t lucky enough to have our naked New York apartment itself be something very unique and representative of who we are. Most of us need to decorate to make it unique.
A select few, however, have jaw-droppingly unique apartments with very one-of-a-kind features. Like, you know, a 14 foot clock face built into our apartment. Or, even better, four of them in our triplex apartment.
Enjoy more photos thanks to Apartment Therapy’s post from last year.
By GunnyPublished: 14 January 2010 12:10 PM UTCCategories: Featured, Personalize Your Place 
Iviva Olenick, like many New York women, has enjoyed a heartfelt dating life full of love and meditations about love. What makes hers different is that she shares hers with the world. In embroidery.
The photo above is from her book (it sells for $300, not for the faint of wallet, but 30 times cooler than your current coffee table book). As you can see, the process of hand-stitching one’s reflections on love is very personal; it’s as intimate as a whisper. The fact that her medium has a deep historical resonance for women and is now being used in an entirely new voice only adds to the power of her pieces.
I’m featuring this on Me Lifestyle because of the individuality of each piece, the confessional intimacy, and the fact that Iviva also does custom work for your own whispered intimations.
You must, however, supply your own dating life, ladies.
By GunnyPublished: 12 January 2010 11:46 AM UTCCategories: Featured, Personalize Your Place 
It’s no secret that Etsy.com is the home of many unique, original pieces of art & clothing. But a Me Lifestyle may not be complete without art in your apartment that was made specifically for you.
Enter Edward Piatt, a San-Francisco-based artist who creates original screen prints on 1/2″ Birch Wood. Rather than using ink, he uses a walnut stain to achieve the effect you see above. Pieces range from a square foot ($40) to…get this…4 feet by 5 feet — for $175.
Best part? He can do custom work with your own photographs. Check out examples of his work and imagine what you’d like on your own custom piece.
[The Me Lifestyle is pure editorial. We accept no compensation for recommendations.]
By GunnyPublished: 12 January 2010 11:44 AM UTCCategories: Living, Personalize Your Place There are times when a Me Lifestyle tips over, crossing the line from “living your life on your own terms” into “complete and utter narcissism”. Luckily for us, those times are sometimes caught and preserved online. In the example below, a woman on Yahoo Answers asks if she can turn her computer monitor into a mirror. Apparently, she’s already tried one option and it didn’t work out so well.
Read the whole life-disaffirming thread here.
(Hat tip to the Geekologie writer for this, especially since he’s been emotionally reeling from the recent revelation that the Superficial writer is making a dishonest woman out of his girlfriend.)
By GunnyPublished: 07 January 2010 3:02 PM UTCCategories: Living Ryan and I attended the Artist Placement Group opening last night at apexart before grabbing a drink with Joan. For those of you whose Me Lifestyle includes conceptual art, this exhibit is worth exploring.
Have you ever wondered how much cooler your company would be if you had a writer or indie filmmaker or painter just hanging around the halls and suggesting stuff? Back in 1966, Artist Placement Group felt like artists are walled off from organizations like businesses, government agencies, and other more vanilla parts of life. So they decided to convince businesses (don’t ask me how) to hire artists to sit around and do whatever they wanted. What they found was two crazy outcomes:
- It actually changed the culture of the organization and altered their decisionmaking. The organizations became more creative and actually began to ask different questions.
- The artists gained access to a world they never had access to before and started to incorporate it into their work.
I love this idea of “placing” artists. I did this once before at my former design agency by hiring a conceptual artist to just hang out and spit out crazy ideas, and it changed everything for the better. Can you imagine what artists would do to Duane Reade?
Well done, Tribeca. Here’s the information for the exhibit. Ignore the Brainy-French-Situationalist-style description of the exhibit that is completely impossible to decipher.
By SaraPublished: 06 January 2010 5:18 PM UTCCategories: Living 
Freezing cold weather can only be acceptable in one place in my mind- on top of a gorgeous ski slope. There are quite a variety of getaways for integrating your ski and snowboarding passion into your city lifestyle. A few friends and family members have opted for second homes in the Catskills, a few hop buses early Saturday mornings to a day at their local mountain, and then there are the few lucky ones that board on the two hour direct flight out of NYC on a whim to make first tracks in fresh powder at Mont Tremblant.
Mont Tremblant in Quebec has been my favorite mountain since i was a kid and even now takes my breath away. The spectacular mountain views from 2780 foot elevation give you chills down your spine. Tremblant has over 652 acres of boardable terrain and 95 trails to explore. Not only is the skiing out of this world, but you cant beat the ski in/ ski out restaurants, bars, galleries and more. Other Winter activities include cross-country skiing, dog sledding, helicopter tours, horseback riding, ice-climbing, paintball, sleigh rides, snowmobiling, snowshoeing, and spas. At night Tremblant comes alive with a exciting nightlife.
The experience just isn’t complete without a visit to the charming french towns scattered at the base of the mountain. My favorite spot for a great dining experience is in Saint-Sauveur, Quebec at the Creperie Bretonne.
Digg!
