What do you get when you convert adjacent condominiums in Manhattan’s Trump Tower into a single 3,500-square-foot space? You get stunning wraparound views of the east, south, and west sides of the Big Apple from 49 floors in the sky. You also get a large, concrete structural support in the middle of the room where the wall dividing the condos used to stand.
The project’s architect, Charles Rabinovitch of C.M. Rabinovitch/Architects in Riverdale, N.Y., took advantage of the pillar and made the location the focal point of the sweeping loft-like space. Of course you’d never know the concrete eyesore is there thanks to the custom-built laminate cabinet surrounding it that serves as an attractive visual barrier between the living room and the dining room on the other side.
The two-toned cabinet does more than camouflage a structural element. It also swallows a rack of state-of-the-art audio/ video gear, three loudspeakers for the front channels of a surround-sound system, and a 50-inch plasma TV to boot.
As electronics become more integrated into the contemporary lifestyle, architects and interior designers are increasingly challenged with ways to make them disappear. Flat-panel technology has eased the burden of the large-screen TV, but it hasn’t solved all of the installation problems that TVs present. Even a cutting-edge plasma is too much TV for some clients, leaving architects to scramble for clever disappearing-TV tricks. Rabinovitch, for one, enjoys the challenge.
“In this project there’s an interesting convergence of the technical requirements and the architectural issues,” he says. “The center cabinet unit between living and dining areas adds a freestanding element, and by coincidence it’s the location of a concrete structural element that had been the division between the east and west apartments,” he says. “Since it was centrally located it could serve as the nerve center of the whole media system.”
The media system extends beyond the plasma and its surround-sound entourage of amplifiers, speakers, and video source components to include a multi-room audio system that funnels music to eight individual zones within the space. A Lutron lighting control system not only sets lighting levels according to mood or for best viewing of the plasma TV, it also operates the motorized blinds covering the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Despite all the audio/video activity inside the floor-to-ceiling, 5-foot-deep divider, the electronic bling remains mostly under wraps. The plasma and its supporting speaker trio are mounted on a powered assembly that motors out of the cabinet when it’s time for a big game or a movie. Then it retracts into hiding when the show’s over. The choreography is directed by a Crestron home control system that manages audio, video, lighting, drapes, and the motorized plasma mount.
