Until her death in February at 94, Ms. Bassman, whose hauntingly erotic black-and-white portraits of the supermodels of her era decorated the pages of Harper’s Bazaar in the 1950s and ’60s, lived and worked in the carriage house. After renouncing fashion photography in 1969, she rented the house’s enormous all-white ground-floor studio to the privacy-loving Abstract Expressionist artist Helen Frankenthaler for two decades.
“I was proud of the fact that we were able to keep this house in the family for more than 50 years,” said Ms. Bassman’s son, Eric C. Himmel, the editor in chief of Abrams Books, “but my sister and I have been talking it over for months, and we agreed that without our parents here, the feeling of the space isn’t the same, that it really was all about their spirits. So it’s time to move on and let another family bring their vision.”
His sister, Lizzie Himmel, a photographer, recalls a charmed childhood: The night before Jimi Hendrix came to the studio to be photographed by her father, Paul Himmel, a documentary photographer, Ms. Himmel sneaked downstairs and modeled the assortment of fringed leather vests the musician intended to wear for the shoot. She also remembers the explosive occasion when her mother had the model Carmen Dell’Orefice pose in a fountain lit by strings of colored lights: the splashing from the fountain hit the wires and blew every fuse in the studio.
After multiple renovations, the first of which was supervised in 1959 by Ms. Bassman and Mr. Himmel, who later became a psychotherapist, the three-story, 7,000-square-foot brick structure at 117 East 83rd Street has most recently been reconfigured as two distinct residences with four distinct living levels under the same roof. In size and scope, and with the exposed structural elements in many of its rooms, it was, in essence, a loft ahead of its time: Ms. Bassman bought the carriage house because she envisioned it as a perfect raw space in which to make and display art, raise two children, and nurture a 73-year marriage.
Ms. Bassman and her husband, who died in 2009, lived upstairs in a sun-splashed duplex studded by black-and-white tile patios of their own design and brightened by oversized skylights; their unit has four bedrooms and three bathrooms, with a great room that doubled as studio. The white cabinetry in the kitchen is vintage 1959. Ms. Bassman preferred rooms painted white and floors tiled in white, though Mr. Himmel was allowed to paint his study in shades of brown. Most of the home’s white glazed brick walls date to 1900, as do the polished concrete floors on the lower level.
After Ms. Frankenthaler decamped in 1995, the downstairs studio and darkroom space was converted in 1997 into a duplex residence for Mr. Himmel, his wife, Caroline Miller, at the time the editor of New York magazine and currently the editorial director of Childmind.org, and their three children. D. D. Allen of the architecture firm Pierce Allen did the renovation, transforming a stark white space with 13-foot ceilings into a Mediterranean-style retreat enhanced by a sprawling eat-in kitchen that opens onto a garden and a master-bedroom suite with blue carriage doors that reveal a glass-roofed solarium.
Originally designed and built by S. G. Slocum for John Boulton Simpson, the president of the Espey Piano Company, who used it as a garage and stable, the carriage house features a Romanesque Revival facade and retains a ground-level garage large enough to accommodate a sport utility vehicle. An integral element of the studio, the garage offered easy access to whatever horse (for a famous shoot with the model Suzy Parker) or zebra (for an advertisement) that Ms. Bassman invited in. The garage caught Madonna’s eye when she was shopping for a town house in the neighborhood: “Everybody with a private garage got a leaflet that said something like, ‘Desperately Seeking Townhouse With Garage,’ ” Lizzie Himmel said.
Before the imaginative conversion, the carriage house was owned by International Business Machines, now known as I.B.M., which bought it in 1942 for its chairman, Thomas J. Watson, who used it to house his collection of cars and the staff that tended them.
The listing broker, Kirk Henckels of Stribling Associates, said the carriage house stands out for its location just off Park Avenue and its side windows. “It’s wide and bright and offers architectural freedom outside the vernacular of a town house, which can be limited,” he said. Whether it is haunted by a cadre of artistic ghosts has yet to be determined.