The Morris B. Sanders House on E. 49th Street Is for Sale

On East 49th Street, between Second and Third Avenues, a bright-red door at street level is set at an angle, as if propped open for a visitor. Above it, the façade at 219 appears to float, alternating boxy terraces with clear and glass-block windows in a wall of dark-blue brick-and-glass tile. It’s stark but colorful, an odd sight on a block known for the Tudor-style apartment at 225, the shadowy Amster Yard at 211, and the Flemish and Regency-style row houses across the way that were once home to Stephen Sondheim and Katharine Hepburn. And it was perhaps an even odder sight in 1935, when the home was finished, becoming the first built from the ground up in New York City with the modern, clean lines pioneered by Le Corbusier and tweaked by William Lescaze. Both 219 and Lescaze’s townhome — renovated in the same style just a year earlier, one block south — survived long enough to be individually landmarked, with the former taking the name of its architect resident, the Morris B. Sanders House.

Independently wealthy and known by friends for a “strong, inflexible nature that would permit no compromise,” Sanders was born into the business. His father was in plumbing, and his uncle studied architecture. Sanders went to Yale and ended up in Paris between the wars, where he might have ogled the work of Le Corbusier. Back in New York with his license in hand, he knocked over an 1869 house to build a six-story, 6,900-square-foot building to his exacting specifications, filling it with custom furniture and cutting-edge tech including central air and recessed lighting. (General Electric gave him its own recognition for the use of its tubular bulbs.) Built during the Great Depression, the house was a showpiece for both what Sanders could do and what modernism could be. In 1936, Architectural Forum published a ten-page glossy spread that praised 219 for “scorning any effort to preserve the amenities” on a block where “the contrast between old and new could hardly be more extreme.” Even in the 1960s, the house stood out for its “revolutionary character,” according to the critic Ada Louise Huxtable, who called it a work of “protest against the routine mannerisms of overworked period styles.” And in today’s market, it’s still a standout. “If you’re looking for your quintessential townhouse, this isn’t it,” says broker Martin Eiden, who is representing the family who has lived and worked there for more than 50 years, using the building just like the Sanders family had — as a home, a rental, and a business.

Price: $5.3 million ($4,747 in monthly taxes)

Specs: Ground-floor office, duplex (3 beds, 3 bathrooms), triplex (3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms)

Extras: Roof deck, two terraces, basement, original cabinetry, lighting, and interior detail by Sanders

Listed by: Martin Eiden and Zoe Jackson, Compass

The distinctive red door opens to an angled hallway with an intercom that looks like a metal Mondrian: an immense panel with three tiny buttons lodged in a lower-left corner, under an exposed lightbulb. Up a shallow set of stairs and through a door with a circular window is the ground-floor office that Sanders built to run his practice. On the street side, glass bricks let in light but filter out chaos and noise — an innovation at the time. The office stretches a full 64 feet back, doing away with the larger backyard that was no longer needed for modern city dwellers who didn’t do laundry outside or keep horses. The main stairs lead up to a duplex designed as a rental, with a loggia over 49th Street and a showy centerpiece: a curving staircase with a chrome handrail designed by Sanders, who also designed tubular chrome furniture. (“At its best in rooms such as these,” praised Architectural Forum.)

Above the rental duplex is an owner’s triplex with a “penthouse”-style bedroom on the top floor that leads out to a private roof deck. One floor down, a primary suite has built-ins with curving cabinets. On the fourth floor was an entrance designed to impress visitors: Its open plan stretches from a dining area in back with a picture window framing Amster Yard, and a living room in front where a flat wall of unembellished wood frames a fireplace of plain limestone slabs. Sanders’s custom furniture for the space is long gone. (Though you can still grab an item here and there online.)

Don and Taki Wise raised their family and ran overlapping businesses at 219. Don, who died in 2012, was an artist, curator, and adman who founded a marketing firm in 1952 that specialized in home décor, repping the Danish designer Georg Jensen. One of Don’s companies owned the building by 1970, when it handed ownership to him personally. Taki, who is selling now, had also worked in marketing as a fashion stylist, but she found a new niche when she opened a Soho gallery that turned the business of fashion photography into an art form to sell to collectors. When they didn’t need the duplex, they rented it out. In 1983, when the New York Times stopped by, the ground-floor unit was home to HEA Productions, a firm that supplied jingles for NBC (“Just Watch Us Now”) and Hallmark ads (“Birthday”).

The old offices still hold books and papers on shelves and flat files, and Eiden has staged the owner’s triplex, but the bare bones of the house is the selling point, showing just how much thought Sanders put into the space. Built-in cabinets curve just where a busy parent would want to slide past them. Closets abound — with three in the primary suite alone. And there’s a separate bathroom for every bedroom, where the original sinks, mirrors, and grids of white tile look very 2025. The living room floors are a surprising spongy cork. And the glass bricks differ in size in different rooms, perhaps to match the “scale of the rooms they adjoin,” as MoMA curator John McAndrew has argued. There’s a sense that the home is the work of a perfectionist, someone who couldn’t settle for what’s been done. Describing his design philosophy, Sanders once told a roomful of teachers, “The materials and methods at hand must be deftly fitted to suit the real end in view.”