A residential building on East 15th Street overlooking Union Square in Manhattan, New York City. Originally Tiffany & Company’s 19th-century headquarters, it was refurbished and reopened in 2008 as high-end apartments.

15 Union Square West had long been a landmark in peril. Its first inception in 1870 as the original home of Tiffany & Company instantly established a legacy of luxury for the building and its location. However, less than a 100 years later the building had fallen into dangerous disrepair, with an infamous cornice displacement and falling debris leading to a pedestrian killing, sealing the building’s fate in 1952. Having been stripped of its splendor, Eran Chen, initially a Partner at Perkins Eastman and later a founding partner at ODA-Architecture was handed little more than a white box by its new owners in 2006. The challenge was not only to turn this commercial space into a desirable residential building, but to create a new landmark that would again attract New York’s most affluent clientele.