It’s hard to believe, but there was a time when being a starving artist in New York could have real estate advantages. Tom Levine is proof.  In 1974, Mr. Levine moved to the city from Cincinnati, following his older brother, James Levine, the conductor and longtime musical director for the Metropolitan Opera. The younger Mr. Levine, a painter of abstracts, took up residence on Greene Street in SoHo, in a 1,500-square-foot, fourth-floor walk-up loft for which he paid $165 a month.  “There were two restaurants,” Mr. Levine, 68, said, remembering the pre-mall version of the neighborhood. “Fanelli Cafe, which is still there, and Food, which was run by artists. There weren’t any cars on the street. It was great.”  He and his fellow tenants got together and bought the building, and he remained there for decades. When he finally outgrew the space, and his neighbors included more lawyers than artists, Mr. Levine sold the apartment in 2002 for a nifty profit.  The sale gave him the funds for the down payment on his current home: a $2.7 million, 5,500-square-foot loft in Chelsea that takes up an entire floor of what were once administrative offices for a clothing retailer. It’s the sort of place where the elevator opens right into the apartment, and a visitor experiences the pleasant illusion of being transported to somewhere quieter and more rural.  Wide-plank pine floorboards suggest a refurbished barn, as does the long farm table in the kitchen. Around it sit Bank of England-style chairs that Mr. Levine picked up at used-office-supply stores on Canal Street. Lined up on a shelf nearby are several Karen Karnes pots, one of the many folk art collections (African masks, Chinese cricket cages) on display in the apartment.  “I didn’t want a shiny place,” Mr. Levine said, sitting at the farm table in an old sweatshirt. “It’s not my style, never has been my style.”  In creating the one-bedroom loft from raw, empty space, he consulted his friend Bill Katz, a designer that W magazine has described as an “aesthetic consigliere” to heavy hitters like Diane von Furstenberg and Jasper Johns. Mr. Levine’s budget was limited (buying the place was a great financial leap, he said), and his needs were simple.  He wanted a library for his many books, which was achieved by creating a long central hallway lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves. And he needed a home studio where he could work; the northeast corner, with its steady northern light, became a rectangular studio so big that whole apartments could be sculpted from its blank mass. (In another wing, Mr. Levine did, in fact, create a separate apartment, which he said he sublets to cover part of his mortgage.)  Of the studio, Mr. Katz said, “I wanted to make it large enough so that it read as the heart of Tom’s existence.”  Last week, the studio area was looking especially cavernous; Mr. Levine had just removed his paintings for a show of his work at Washburn Gallery, appropriately titled “New Paintings,” which runs through May 10. All that remained were big work tables and a couple of canvases with in-progress scribbles.  “You work in a studio, and you work alone,” Mr. Levine said of his daily monastic routine. With the exception of two cats, he lives alone, too.  While Mr. Levine’s art was largely absent, the walls were covered with works by other artists, many of whom he has admired or known, including Roy Lichtenstein, Sol LeWitt, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Mr. Levine reveres Mr. Johns, and enthusiastically showed off the lithographs, etchings and silk-screens that make up the “Jasper Johns shrine” in his home office.  The palatial home and studio seemed a coup for an artist in modern-day Manhattan. But Mr. Levine said the former starving young artist in him had nearly given it up. He was so worried about the cost of the loft, and paying off the mortgage, that in 2005 he decamped to the Chelsea Hotel, put it up for sale and found a buyer.  “The deal fell through,” he said. “And it was just as well.”
Tom Levine more than tripled his live/work space when he moved from SoHo. He shares his new loft with two cats and a shrine to Jasper Johns.