In Detroit, that much space and style costs just a tenth of that, $475K. Located in the Sixth Street Lofts building in the Motor City’s Corktown neighborhood, this sprawling condo sits on the top, penthouse floor and currently features two bedrooms and two bathrooms, with plenty of space to expand. Hardwood floors line the entire apartment, while SubZero and Viking appliances highlight the kitchen. Better yet, there’s even parking in the basement. Try getting that feature for free with your multimillion-dollar Big Apple loft.

The client’s lifestyle is utilitarian, blending professional, technology-based investigations with domestic functions. The design draws heavily on the client’s desire for a space exuding a practical, modern simplicity, and was influenced by his aesthetic sensitivities and emphasis on the adaptability, prefabrication and modularity of the project components. Functional insertions into the existing concrete shell created an efficient, adaptable “armature” for his evolving needs and lifestyle. In this respect, the space is a residential laboratory.

In the case of Tribeca, the posh area of lofts and lattes that has arisen there over the last 20 years first coexisted with and then replaced the Washington Market, the cityâ€s wholesale larder. When the last of the egg-and-cheese dealers left Duane Street a few years ago, that phase of the neighborhoodâ€s life was definitively put to rest. But the built residue it left—the loading docks that line the Belgian-block-paved streets, the arch-punctured fortress warehouses in brick and stone—are still calling all the designerly shots.

The – since sold – home of movie director John Curran and Kristen Frederickson, longtime Tribecans from a few blocks away, is a perfect statement about the areaâ€s reinhabitation. The 80-foot-deep three-bedroom loft apartment was designed by New Yorkâ€s Ike Kligerman Barkley Architects, with Joel Barkley taking the lead. It manages to celebrate the guts of the old neighborhood without any denial that there is much to enjoy about the new.

Before - A 12-inch-thick concrete floor had to be removed with a jackhammer. “It looked like the worldâ€s largest collection of moon rocks,” Kligerman says.

After. The living area has a felt rug and vintage Thonet Industries armchairs. Wool felt sofa fabric from Decorators Walk.

Before it was elevated to its present state, the second floor of this brick-fronted, cast-iron-boned building on an overlooked side street was used for decades as a butter warehouse. Then, during a brief interregnum in which the area was colonized as a down-market outpost of the nearby Wall Street business district, it served as an office for an insurance broker. It was at that time that the space suffered the indignity that would be the renovationâ€s principal challenge to correct: the pouring of a 12-inch-deep concrete floor on top of the original wood one. It was duly jackhammered out at the start of construction—“We called it Beirut on the Hudson,” Frederickson says—a move that won back the spaceâ€s original 11-foot ceilings but presented, as these things always do, a new cascade of problems. Chief among these was the elevator, the primary entrance, which had been installed to meet the former height.

Before. Barkleyâ€s goal was to create “an open, dramatic, dynamic construction that also held room for the warm, soft, comfortable, cozy.”

After. A large raw space was turned into a combined dining area, kitchen and living area. Beyond the 1955 Danish teak table hang plaster relief figures by Brenna Beirne. The flooring is “green” bamboo. “In 13 months you could grow what youâ€d need to replace it,” Kligerman says.

Barkley and his clients—for whom he had previously designed a summer house in New Jersey, never built—arrived at a simple solution that recalls the evolution of the space. “Itâ€s kind of a sitcom entry, like on The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” the architect says. Stepping out of the elevator, you find yourself on a mock-concrete platform from which you can survey the L-shaped loft space at the heart of the apartment.

The living area, in the short leg of the L, is straight ahead, defined by a custom bench and sofa and a pair of vintage Thonet Industries armchairs (the firmâ€s Mia Jung collaborated on the interior design) and lined with floor-to-ceiling zinc shelves that continue into the study, which lies beyond. (The bookshelves have made such an impression on their daughterâ€s friends—her room, which is tucked into the opposite corner of the apartment, includes a wall-long stage complete with curtains—that they have gone home and reported to their parents that “Avery lives in a library.”) The living area is prevented from appearing to float too much in the space by its thick felt rug and by one of the loftâ€s handsome ornamented columns, which comes down to anchor one corner.
The effect of so much of this bright, fine-grained fiber is to divorce the new construction from the vestiges of the old—the columns, the deep beams that span the spaces, the exposed-brick walls (both painted and plain) and the braced joists that support the floor above.

In the master bedroom, an 18th-century English oak chest sits before the original brick-and-stone wall. Above the bed are black-and-white photos taken of the figures in the living area.

There is also a kind of practical wit in evidence here that serves to synchronize the design with the ethic of the neighborhood—and to deflate pretension. For instance, where that column in the living area comes to ground, an ellipse has been cut through the rug; zippers radiating from it at the cardinal points provide a touch of ornamental detail, anchor the plain yet commodious furnishings and—not least—allowed the thing to lie around the column in the first place. Downlights in the one dropped ceiling—necessary to hide the ventilation ducts and pipes of the apartment above—are scattered without pattern in what Barkley calls a “constellation.” From the master bedroom, a window at pillow level gives a view out onto the living area. (In one wall there is a low portal that lets the cats, one friendly, three retiring, get to their hidden backstage loo.)

The kitchen has bamboo cabinets and stainless-steel counters, shelves and backsplashes. Screens, left, help divide the area. Viking range and hood.

In the kitchen, there is a glass-front refrigerator—Frederickson, an art historian who owns a gallery nearby, says that “curating” the exposed comestibles is her secret obsession—and a large porcelain sink that strikes one of the few off notes in this carefully conceived home.

“All I wanted was a white farmhouse sink and a place for my books,” Frederickson explains. Her husband also got his own design hiccup approved: The door to the master bedroom, which continues up a few feet past the rest, breaks a datum that is established by the honeycomb-filled plastic panel walls and reinforced in the hanging of two series art pieces. That this request was granted to Curran, a financier on the tallish side, speaks volumes about the useful lack of ideology that drove Barkleyâ€s design process and that gives the apartment such an unpretentious feel. “It was my birthday present,” Curran says, smiling.

A ceramic-tile bench and a stainless-steel towel bar in the master bath are bisected by the frameless glass shower wall. Randomly placed downlights echo similar ones elsewhere in the loft.

The smile is well deserved. When he first saw the derelict floor of the aging building that would become the familyâ€s home, he says he thought to himself, “Letâ€s just leave now. This is never going to happen.” Barkley counters with a more positive spin: “It was just a blank canvas.” But Frederickson, who knows a thing or two about that particular metaphor, gets the last word. “No,” she says. “It was a horrible, dirty, disgusting canvas.”

The main floor of the sleek modern apartment is dominated by four working clocks housed in four 14-foot-high round windows, which provide nearly unobstructed views (well, except for the clock faces) out to the four points of the compass.

The penthouse sits atop one of the tallest buildings in Dumbo, the cobblestoned neighborhood that sprang to life in the 1980s in a former industrial area between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.

The buyer of the apartment need not worry about the nightmare of having four giant clocks each showing a different time. The four clocks are electronically synchronized to show exactly the same time.

The 3,000-square-foot main floor has a huge open living room, dining room and kitchen with 16-foot-high ceilings. The loft also includes a glass elevator and a staircase made of stainless steel, glass and oak. A glass-walled elevator and a three-story floating staircase at the center of the space lead to smaller floors that narrow toward the top of the tower. There are three bedrooms on the 2,300-square-foot second floor (watch your head as you walk along the exterior walls), and on the floor above that, a 988-square-foot open loft with a 15-foot ceiling. Finally, up a narrow staircase at the very top of the building is a tiny (well, compared to the loft, it’s actually 400-square-foot) windswept crowâ€s nest roof deck.

The windows provide nearly unobstructed views (except for the clock faces) out to the four points of the compass.

A glass-walled elevator and a three-story floating staircase at the center of the space lead to smaller floors that narrow toward the top of the tower.

The master bathroom.

There are three bedrooms on the 2,300-square-foot second floor (watch your head as you walk along the exterior walls).

Finally, up a narrow staircase at the very top of the building is a tiny windswept crow's nest.

The apartment was created by David Walentas, the creator of the Dumbo neighborhood itself, in an old industrial building built by a cardboard box manufacturer. Mr. Walentas renamed the factory the ClockTower Building and converted it first into offices for the New York State Labor Department, and then, in 1998, into 124 condominiums.

Mr. Walentas kept an apartment in the building, where he lives with his wife, Jane, as well as the apartment with the clocks on the 16th floor. He negotiated a deal with the condominium board a few years ago to incorporate the tower space into the 16th-floor apartment.

In an interview with the New York Times, Mr. Walentas shared a few insights about the apartment:

Mr. Walentas, 71, is the founder and principal of the Two Trees Management Company, which has developed and managed more than four million square feet of commercial and residential real estate, mostly in New York City. Mr. Walentas is also credited with establishing the Dumbo neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Q. Could you explain the genesis of the Dumbo name?

A. We were in SoHo almost 40 years ago, and then we did the Silk Building in NoHo. When I was in NoHo, I asked one of the artists, one of the kids, SoHo, NoHo, whatâ€s next? And somebody said, “Dumbo.” I said, Where the hell is Dumbo? He said, “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.” So I came over one day, walked around the neighborhood and said, Wow!

Q. And thatâ€s where the bulk of your development has been since — by the Manhattan Bridge.

A. We bought two million square feet 30 years ago for $12 million, about $6 a foot, which today seems incredibly cheap. But for 20 years everybody thought I was the dumb in Dumbo; now they think Iâ€m a genius.

Q. What are you getting per square foot now?

A. We routinely sell condos for $1,000 a foot. We have a 6,000-square-foot triplex at One Main for $25 million — the Clock Tower.

Q. Do you think someone will pay the $25 million asking price?

A. I donâ€t know. Itâ€s kind of an icon — somewhere between real estate and art. Itâ€s really a spectacular space, with the best views of Lower Manhattan, the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, and New York Harbor. It has four 15-foot-diameter clock faces in each direction on the first level. It has a private elevator that goes up three levels in the center of the space, with a staircase around it. It has a private roof deck, which is half enclosed and half open.

Q. Did you and your wife, Jane, ever consider moving there?
A. Itâ€s just too big. Itâ€s really a showplace, a party place, a statement. We live right below the Clock Tower.

Q. Why do you have “No Guts No Glory” on your cuff?
A. Itâ€s on all my dress shirts. To succeed in life you have to take chances — no risk, no gain. People used to ask me what I do, and I said, I go to battle everyday.