Few people would object to making their homes more environmentally friendly. But, what they might object to, particularly in the high-end, luxury residential market are eco-additions that are not aesthetically attractive (think traditional solar panels). Some New York City residential developments are weaving natural elements into their designs with beautiful and functional garden walls. These vertically irrigated installations with diverse plant species often replace art in lobbies. Not only are they gorgeous in and of themselves but they also drastically improve air quality and reduce noise pollution - something no sculpture or painting can claim.

Here are the top 10 NYC residential developments that get a big green thumbs up.

200 East 21st Street

Credit:Courtesy of Alfa Development

200 East 21st Street is the newest condominium building in Alfa Development’s GreenCollection of sustainable developments located in coveted Gramercy Park. The building is targeting LEED Gold Certification with a range of highly sustainable features such as a green wall curated by EcoWalls and landscaped green roof designed by leading urban landscaping firm Halsted Welles Associates to reduce “heat-island effect”, solar-powered hot water and more. The building features architecture by renowned firm BKSK and interiors by Champalimaud.

Austin Nichols House

Credit: Christina Dolamore

Morris Adjmi Architects redesigned this 1915 Cass Gilbert building, previously a warehouse for the Austin, Nichols & Co., once the city’s largest grocer and distributor of Wild Turkey. Adjmi's renovation blends old and new to re-envision the structure into a waterfront residential oasis. The building's lobby features a massive, 20-foot tall, floor-to-ceiling garden wall that includes 3,500 plants over 500 square feet. The wall is complemented by hexagonal Italian tile flooring and hand painted cement columns. Residents also have access to a floor of amenities that include co-working spaces, a resident cafe and catering kitchen, children’s playroom, theatre, music rehearsal rooms which all look onto a central zen garden and courtyard with landscaping, elevated walkways and a fire pit. To top off the natural amenities, the rooftop sun deck offers unobstructed waterfront views.

Citizen360

Credit: Courtesy of Anbau Enterprises 

Citizen360 is a new Yorkville condominium tower designed by SHoP Architects and by developed by Anbau. Holistic designer Clodagh crafted the amenities to offer residents a respite from the city. A standout feature is the lush lobby green wall created by Town & Gardens that offers an immediate spa-like feel when residents come home. The aesthetic is modern and intimate with sleek lines and natural warm finishes. Citizen360 has 84 residences and additional amenities include a wellness lounge, gym outfitted by The Wright Fit and an automated parking system.

Cast Iron House

Credit:Hayes Davidson

Cast Iron House is one of New York’s quintessential examples of 19th century cast-iron architecture from 1881 where an enclosed 30-foot bamboo forest will grow along the south side of the building's sunken courtyard rising up to the lobby level. Located on the corner of 67 Franklin Street in Tribeca, the building has a total of 13 homes, including two exceptional penthouses. Shigeru Ban’s architectural concept for Cast Iron House is quite unique as he envisions the original cast iron façade as a bottle with each newly built-out reimagined interior as the ship. This is his first historic conversion in New York.

252 East 57th Street

Credit: Courtesy of 252 East 57th Street

Anchoring the eastern corridor of Manhattan’s Billionaire’s Row, 252 East 57th Street is a 65-story ultra-luxury condominium designed by internationally recognized architectural firm SOM, with interiors by lauded AD100 interior architect Daniel Romualdez. The building entrance has a walkway between babbling pools of water to enter the lobby that is clad in marble and limestone with a lush, floor-to-ceiling, living green wall and a long brass table brimming with plants. Inspired by nature, the natural elements of water, glass, greenery, stone, and wood come together to create the feeling of a tranquil oasis within a built environment.

Developed by World Wide Group and Rose Associates, the tower features 95 condominiums beginning on the 36th floor.

Ellipse

Credit: Courtesy of Ellipse

Located on the waterfront of Jersey City’s Newport neighborhood and designed by internationally-acclaimed design firm Arquitectonica, At LeFrak's curvaceous rental tower Ellipse's entrance,  residents are greeted by a massive green wall that spans an entire wall in the 24-hour attended lobby. A living mural, the green wall depicts a scene of a sailor crossing the Hudson River between Manhattan and Newport, a scene that will only become more vibrant and complex with time as the plants continue to grow.

180 East 88th Street

Credit: March Made for DDG

180 East 88th Street is a striking condominium situated in the coveted Carnegie Hill neighborhood of Manhattan's Upper East Side. Developed and designed by DDG, the building sports a custom façade composed of almost 600,000 handmade, handset bricks from world-renowned brickworks Petersen Tegl. Embracing this artisanal aesthetic, the condominium's statement entrance is one of its most eye-catching details. As residents arrive, they are greeted by a sprawling vertical garden that elegantly climbs its way up the side of the brick-clad building, creating a serene entrance. The vertical garden is echoed by an array of plantings surrounding the walkway and complemented by the striking arched bronze entryway.

70 Charlton

Credit: Evan Joseph

Nestled in the heart of Hudson Square, Extell’s 70 Charlton was designed to be an urban sanctuary in the middle of a bustling neighborhood with a variety of wellness offerings to ensure sound mind and body. To complement the building’s sanctuary-like collection of amenities is an interior courtyard space with landscaped gardens complete with a tall living wall with cascading plants to promote serenity throughout residents lifestyle experience.

152 Elizabeth

Credit: Noe & Associates and The Boundary

Tadao Ando's concrete and glass condominium at 152 Elizabeth Street is his first residential development in NYC and outside of Asia. The buildings's highly anticipated concrete exterior hosts a living garden wall which changes color and texture throughout the seasons. Click here to see a video of the living wall (and the rest of the building).

The post Stunning Garden Walls That Get A Green Thumbs Up appeared first on Haute Residence by Haute Living.

One Central Park may be Sydney’s most ambitious urban village design since the city’s iconic Opera House.

Touted as Australia’s greenest urban village, the eco-friendly, foliage-covered residential complex certainly plays the part well; it houses its own tri-generation plant which supplies electricity, heating, and cooling using "ingenious green transformers" powered by natural gas. But the most obvious features of this skyline curiosity are vertical gardens growing up the skyscraper façades and massive cantilevered mirror panels that reflect light into the building’s lower levels.

With One Central Park, lead collaborators French architect Jean Nouvel and botanist Patrick Blanc converted an abandoned brewery and four city blocks into Sydney’s most ambitious urban village design since the completion of the city’s iconic Opera House in 1973. Nouvel (Paris’ Quai Branly Museum and New York’s Tower Verre/Moma Tower) and Blanc (Miami’s Pérez Art Museum and Paris’ L’Oasis D’Aboukir) are famous for their bold projects.

The towers at One Central Park stand above five floors of retail shopping.

One Central Park is the key part of a 5.8 hectare site in Sydney that boasts 30,000-square meters of open parks, courtyards and terraces, a five-story retail shopping mall, cafes, bars, galleries, entertainment venues, offices, and these two main residential towers which solve the constraints of urban space and harness the natural power of the environment.

The self-sufficient towers feature rooftop gardens, lush green walls, solar panels, smart-metering systems, on-site water recycling and a central thermal tri-generation plant that reduces carbon emissions, minimizes mains water demand, and exports excess water and electricity to nearby neighborhoods. In fact, 93% of the material demolished to build One Central Park has already been recycled as well.

One would expect overgrown plant foliage to infest abandoned buildings, not new structures like One Central Park. Blanc (the founding pioneer of vertical gardens) designed one of the tallest green walls in the world over the building’s north and east façades, utilizing 35 plant species on 21 large panels that span 10,764-square feet. With this unique feature, Nouvel and Blanc built the green-theme into the design literally and figuratively.

Botanist Patrick Blanc, inventor of living green walls, designed One Central Park's façade with 35 species of plants.

“Landscape is architecture,” says Nouvel, principal at Ateliers Jean Nouvel Studio. “So at One Central Park, we have created a kind of continuity between the park and the buildings, so the façades literally extend the park into the sky. By miming what can exist in Australian nature, we are proposing a new form of high-rise living in direct contact with nature.”

A green building usually requires an original, un-recycled imagination, and One Central Park is no different. Nouvel built hydroponic and heliostats control technology into the structure so “vegetation and daylight can become more manageable and can be extended to previously inaccessible places of the building."

One Central Park is the key part of Sydney's reported $2 billion revitalization project. The complex, which replaced an abandoned brewery, resides on a 5.8 hectare site boasts 30,000-square meters of open parks, courtyards and terraces

According to Nouvel, hydroponic irrigation systems allow soilless vertical veils of vegetation to grow in planters and on walls all the way up to the tower tops, resulting in green facades that trap carbon dioxide, emit oxygen, and provide energy-saving shade. Nouvel's studio collaborated with lighting specialist Yann Kersale to create the massive suspended heliostat system of 320 reflectors (extending 42 meters off the east tower), which redirect natural sunlight and inject energy down into lower levels of the building. At night, LEDs transform the tower into a grand lighting installation landmark.

A cantilevered heliostat system of 320 mirrors reflect natural sunlight and generate energy into the building. By night, they rely on colorful LEDs.

One Central Park’s 276-foot western tower accommodates 240 residences, while the 384-foot western tower boasts 383 apartments, including 38 penthouses (marketed as Sky at One Central Park), with private entrances exclusive access to an elevated 328-foot sky garden. The garden, which sits on level 29, features an outdoor kitchen, sculpted timber seating and a plunge pool.

The eastern tower has 383 apartments, including 38 penthouses with private entrances and access to private entrances exclusive access to an elevated 328-foot sky garden.

Architects and designers from Sydney, London, Paris, and Copenhagen united to create this unique One Central Park complex. Nouvel teamed with local firm PW Architects to design the unique structures. According to reports, One Central Park is the centerpiece of a $2 billion masterplan in downtown Sydney by developers Frasers Property Australia and Sekisui House Australia. Its interiors were designed by Sydney architect Koichi Takada (east tower) and Smart Design Studio (west tower). The development is adjacent to Broadway on the north end of the Central Park precinct, an area designed by Sir Norman Foster of London-based Foster & Partners.

“At Central Park, we want to give something to the future inhabitants of Sydney by creating a new version of the urban park,” says Nouvel. “Just because you are living in the city, you do not have to lose the advantages of living in the country. For me, vegetation is part of the vocabulary of architecture."

One Central Park architect Jean Nouvel.

There’s no word on which daredevil is in charge of landscaping at the complex. Perhaps trimming the vertical shrubs isn't necessary. After all, the unique towers are self-sufficient, beanstalks or not. Now that we think of it, One Central Park's towers have floral elements... so why not give it the nickname "The Twin Flowers?"

Photos and details courtesy of Dezeen

The post The Twin Flowers: Sydney’s One Central Park is an Urban Garden of Eden appeared first on Haute Residence by Haute Living.