An Immense Soho Townhouse That Was Used in a Beyoncé Video

Price: $39 million

Specs: 3 bedrooms, 3.5 baths

Extras: Swimming pool, elevator, wood-burning fireplace, terrace

Ten-minute walking radius: Balthazar, the Drawing Center, Housing Works Bookstore

Listed by: Douglas Elliman

At a lunch in the 1980s, the art dealer Max Protech and Frank Gehry got to talking about how they would divvy up their new space. They were pooling money to buy a five-story Soho building — 214 Lafayette Street — and Gehry sketched out the general idea on a doily. Protech would have a gallery on the street level, Gehry would have offices in back, and Protech could have storage space upstairs. Gehry never moved in — it turned out those dividing walls were expensive.

Protech conceived of 214 Lafayette as a place to show sculptures. The building was massive, perfect for showing work that couldn’t squeeze into his uptown gallery. From the street, the façade looked grand and bankish with a roofline capped with a Roman pediment and a huge half-circle window. But behind, it wasn’t a bank or floors of impressive apartments. 214 had been a power substation, and the first three floors made up one massive room 100 feet deep — the ideal setting for a show of swirling metal abstractions by Alice Aycock, or a survey that included only women sculptors. “There’s that attitude that women can’t be macho,” Protech said. But against the gritty, industrial space, the show “proved they had visions and ambitions greater than the male architects and artists.”

Protech sold the building in 1996 for $1.7 million to a pair of artists: the songwriter Dyan Humes-Nispel and her husband, Marcus Nispel. In the early ’90s, Marcus rode a surge in budgets for music videos, directing for Mariah Carey, the B-52s, Bette Midler, and Janet Jackson.

The pair renovated 214 for 12 years — adding three bedrooms, a terrace, a wood-burning fireplace, and a den with barrel-vaulted ceilings. The work seemed designed to turn it not into somewhere to live but rather into the ideal home for a video shoot. And it’s unclear if they ever actually lived upstairs. By 2013, the Nispels were renting the space to Hollywood for $20,000 a day.

For bedroom scenes, there were three on the upper floors with a wide terrace off the primary. To play a dance club or a party space or an art studio, even, there was a great room with double-height ceilings. And a lofted area let cameras shoot down easily. But the real draw must have been the 40-foot-long pool. The Nispel renovation lodged it in the basement with a portal window set into the side of the tank that made underwater shots a breeze. John Mayer used it for his 2009 video “Who Says,” and Beyoncé made it famous in “Halo,” gliding through the blue water in diaphanous silks.

In 2016, the building had a starring turn in Mr. Robot as a makeshift office for hackers. Meanwhile, Marcus’s career took off with big box-office remakes of horror features: Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The Nispels put the house on the market last week, asking $39 million. The broker said he and his client wouldn’t comment for this story. But if they’re choosing to sell now, there are two likely reasons. First, the couple divorced in 2022. And second, film shoots in the city have been drying up lately. Still, they’ve been finding uses for it. Last year, McIntosh turned the space into a pop-up showroom for sound systems with the former gallery showcasing a pyramid of amplifiers.

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