BUILD YOUR OWN.(The Talk of the Town)(house in New York, New York)

Here's a way around the city's increasingly impossible real-estate market: build your own house. Granted, it's the road less travelled--if indeed it's travelled at all. (In the last thirteen years, according to Buildings Department records, only one new single-family house has been built in the West Village.) Last month, however, construction began on a town house at 829 Greenwich Street--a small patch of land that sits on the dividing line between the West Village and the meatpacking district.

The owners of the property are a young English couple with two small children who moved to New York in the spring of 2001. "We looked at brownstones in the West Village," the wife said recently. "But we didn't have the budget to buy a four-million-dollar house." Two years ago, on the evening of her birthday, she and her husband walked out of Pastis and passed a decrepit, partially collapsed Federal-style town house. The windows were mortared up, and the brick facade, which was slathered with stucco, bulged out as if at any minute the whole house would fall in on itself. A sign said that it was for sale. "I just knew," she recalled. "I looked at my husband and said, 'This is it.' "

Shortly after signing the contract, they hired the architect Matthew Baird. Baird is a well-spoken man in his late thirties who bears a faint resemblance to Liam Neeson. It took him a week to come up with a design. The interior, he said, borrows from the Federal-style homes of the West Village, but the over-all effect of the house is ultra-modern, taking its cues, Baird said, "from minimalist art and the tough industrial feel of the meatpacking district." The facade is a massive plate of recycled steel, three stories high, that will be bolted onto the front of the building. The back wall is made almost entirely of glass. There is virtually no ornament anywhere. It could hardly be less characteristic of the Village.

Though his clients were thrilled, many of the neighbors were not; and so they showed up at community board meetings to complain, as unthrilled neighbors will. "It looks like a cineplex," Bill Cornwell, the treasurer of the Horatio Street Association, said.

"They wanted it to look like Colonial Williamsburg," Baird said.

One person's avant-garde, though, is another's antique. One of the meatpacking district's better-known businessmen, Florent Morellet, the owner of Florent, the sleek Gansevoort Street diner that ...