Growing up in a New York City townhouse built in 1864, Josh Wiener became accustomed to home renovations early in life. His parents owned the Upper West Side building but leased the duplex upstairs, so whenever a tenant moved out Wiener would help his father recondition the apartment unit to increase the amount of rent the family could request from the next occupant.
“I started off with a lot of scraping, plastering and repainting, and I was very enamored by being able to make a beautiful process and make it hold up,” says Wiener, who continued to restore the townhouse while he attended school at Vassar College and received the minimum wage from his parents to defray the cost. “I’m very much a perfectionist—so I wanted to do things really well.”
After graduating from college Wiener started working on the homes of family friends and refurbishing apartments in the neighborhood surrounding his parents. In 1987, he opened SilverLining Interiors, a general contracting and construction management firm that specializes in remodels and additions for high-end luxury homes, apartments and townhouses within a 100-mile radius of New York City.
“I established myself here in the city,” says Wiener, whose company earned $72 million in revenue last year for 27 remodeling jobs. “I’ve done a bit of work in Miami for some of my clients, and I’ve done work in the Hamptons and in Westchester, so we’ve expanded our breadth a little bit.” Two years ago Weiner brought on a partner, Joel Arencibia, who became the firm’s director of operations.
This year the company trimmed its name down to SilverLining Inc. because the original moniker seemingly limited the scope of the business, which now includes penthouse construction, Wiener explains. The firm has completed projects for high-profile clients such as Jennifer Aniston, Matt Lauer and Sigourney Weaver, and benefits from a favorable reputation among wealthy denizens.
“With famous people, it’s the same as anybody else: Referrals are referrals,” Wiener says. “They know people; they have their own community. [But] a famous person likes to know that you’ve worked with other famous people and respected their privacy—and did the right thing by them.”
SilverLining also displays an ability to maneuver through the several layers of oversight required in New York City, such as the Department of Buildings, superintendents and inspectors. The company records the preexisting conditions of any adjacent housing units in addition to documenting the client’s home, and takes extra steps to ensure that neighbors remain satisfied throughout the job.
“We could be renovating an apartment and the woman downstairs could have a young baby and asks us if we could avoid certain aspects of the renovation during the time her baby is napping,” Wiener says. “I had a client whose neighbor did yoga from 2 to 3 [p.m.] and asked if we could focus our effort in other parts of the apartment while she was doing yoga.”
The service elevators in residential buildings in New York City can be as cramped as 5 feet by 7 feet, Wiener adds, which forces the firm to work from a small space and devise an efficient route for transporting materials. Many suburban contractors cannot field the extra responsibility, he says.
“There are a lot of those coordination issues that can happen working in the city that make things complicated,” Wiener explains. “It’s a challenge but it’s something [that] once you get good at it, people have a lot of confidence in you to do it properly.
SilverLining partners with outside designers and architects to produce the vision of each client, including an 80-foot interior slide that descends the height of a three-story penthouse at 150 Nassau Street, a project the company completed a few years ago. The firm recently has been rebuilding a townhouse and will install a swimming pool in the basement so its owner can swim laps each day. | QR