US man built his own $200,000 home from a tiny janitor's apartment on top of a NYC skyscraper because it reflected how he wanted to live in New York

For most people, finding a tiny former janitor’s apartment at the top of an NYC skyscraper would hardly seem like the starting point for their dream home.

But architect Andrew Tesoro saw something different in the 400-square-foot space and the empty rooftop above it.

He eventually transformed it into a three-story A-frame chalet complete with a huge terrace, creating the kind of home he had always wanted in New York City.

More than three decades later, Tesoro is still living there – and his latest comments show just how little interest he has in giving it up.

How a tiny NYC apartment became a rooftop home

Tesoro’s unusual home is no mansion, but it started with an idea that sounded almost impossible.

In the late 1980s, he was sitting in Riverside Park when he imagined using a helicopter to lift a trailer onto a Manhattan skyscraper.

As Tesoro explained in a 2025 interview with Curbed, the trailer was really a way of expressing how he wanted to live in New York.

He wanted natural light, outdoor space, and somewhere that could give him the feeling of having his own house while remaining in the heart of Manhattan, literally on top of an NYC skyscraper.

After years of searching, he found a 400-square-foot penthouse at 210 West 78th Street on the Upper West Side.

The apartment had originally been the building’s superintendent’s unit, but it came with something Tesoro needed – development rights over the roof of the NYC skyscraper.

The seller initially wanted $205,000, but after two years of negotiating, Tesoro bought the apartment for $158,000 in 1990.

He then paid another $15,000 for the development rights.

His original plan was for a more conventional two-story addition, but New York’s building regulations forced him to rethink the design.

Construction began in 1996, with the initial build costing around $200,000, but the architect kept the costs down by using discarded materials from other projects and inexpensive fixtures.

The solution was an A-frame, which allowed Tesoro to build upward without simply extending the walls of the existing apartment, giving him three levels of living space.

Even the copper roof has an unusual backstory, because he sold a red 1995 Saab he had received from a client to help pay for it.

By 1997, he had moved back into the property, even though it was still far from finished; there was no kitchen, no doors and no railing, but the bathrooms worked, and the roof didn’t leak.

Andrew Tesoro still doesn’t want to leave his house on top of the NYC skyscraper

The finished home quickly became much more than an architectural experiment.

Tesoro adopted his son, Victor, in 2000, and the unconventional apartment became the family’s home.

The three-story layout gave Victor and his friends plenty of space to run around, while the rooftop terrace became the setting for barbecues, a mini-pool and even Victor’s bar mitzvah.

And remarkably, Tesoro still considers parts of the property unfinished.

His 2025 Curbed interview revealed that there are still unfinished closet doors and patches of raw Sheetrock around the home.

There is also a kitchen countertop he wants to replace and a new faucet that has apparently been sitting in its box for years.

The unusual property was featured again in a June 2026 video tour from Caleb Simpson, offering another look inside the rooftop chalet and its distinctive design.

The biggest change, however, has happened outside.

When Tesoro first built the home, he could see the Empire State Building from the corner of the roof and wave to friends walking along Broadway.

New skyscrapers have since blocked much of that view, leaving him with mainly an eastern outlook.

That hasn’t changed how he feels about the property.

Tesoro acknowledged to Curbed that people have told him the apartment could now be worth millions of dollars, but he has no obvious desire to cash in.

“If I love living here, then why?” he told the publication.

It neatly sums up why the unusual home exists in the first place: the architect didn’t set out to create a conventional luxury penthouse or the most polished apartment in Manhattan.

He wanted a home that reflected how he actually wanted to live in New York, and after more than 35 years, he is still doing exactly that.