When you think of great New York artists, few names loom larger than the late Joel Shapiro. The celebrated sculptor, whose angular, gravity-defying figures are icons of modern art, spent his life exploring form, balance, and the spaces in between. Now, just months after his passing at 83, the Manhattan home he shared with his painter wife, Ellen Phelan, has hit the market for $4.75 million. Eileen Angelo and Max Collins of Sotheby’s International Realty hold the listing.
The duplex, tucked inside a 1907 building on East 67th Street in Lenox Hill, is every bit as striking as you might expect from a couple so steeped in art and architecture. The couple purchased the apartment in the early 2000s and immediately reimagined it from the ground up. Their renovation—done in the ’90s but still timeless—introduced beveled glass casement doors, brass hardware, and a sweeping staircase that feels almost like one of Shapiro’s own pieces brought to life.
Elsewhere on the main floor is a south-facing library with a fireplace, a dedicated home office, and a corner guest bedroom with a private bath. The entire second floor has been transformed into a grand primary suite that’s complete with a mezzanine that overlooks the living room, a bedroom with a fireplace, a separate sitting/dressing room, two walk-in closets, a large bathroom, and a spacious laundry room.
Shapiro, born in Queens in 1941, remained fiercely loyal to New York City throughout his career, maintaining a studio in Long Island City even as his work appeared in museums and public spaces around the world. (His largest piece stands outside the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.) Phelan, an acclaimed painter, often explored themes of domesticity and place in her own work, which is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum.
The Italian Renaissance-style building, designed by architect Charles A. Platt while at the firm of Rossiter and Wright, has long been a haven for creative minds. Over the decades, it’s housed everyone from a Rockefeller heir to design legends Massimo and Lella Vignelli, who created New York’s iconic subway map. For Shapiro and Phelan, it offered both proximity to the city’s cultural heart and a private, light-filled refuge above it all.
Their creative life, however, wasn’t confined to Manhattan. The couple also owned a lakeside estate in Westport, New York. Another work of art in its own right, the Prairie-style property, known as Kenjockety, sits on the shore of Lake Champlain and was their retreat from city life. There, amid 1,400 feet of waterfront and gardens designed by landscape architect Dan Kiley, they restored a 1910 home into a serene, art-filled sanctuary. That property is also currently on the market—first listed this summer for $5.49 million, now asking $4.8 million.