Nuchtern House (Northeast Corner of MacDougal St. and Prince St.)

One of the most intriguing and beautiful sets of windows in SoHo belongs to the Nuchtern House, located on the corner of MacDougal St. and Prince St. The house has two addresses: 34 MacDougal St. and 205 Prince St., which just shows you how big the thing is. Besides being a lovely and very large single-family house, which is rare enough in SoHo, its four giant street-level windows positively teem with gorgeous vegetation.

I stole the above picture from the blog New York Daily Photo, because I didn't take a full picture of the whole house. On that site, I also learned that the home is owned by Anna and Simon Nuchtern. Simon Nuchtern, originally from Belgium, is a filmmaker, formerly for August Films. He now runs Katina Productions, a film and video production and subtitling services company, out of his SoHo home. The two large grates in the sidewalk on the Prince St. side are also fascinating, as there are huge windowboxes outside the below-ground windows, with giant hostas reaching up toward the sun.

I took this picture, and the following window pictures. This is the single tall window of Nuchtern House on the MacDougal St. side, showing the amazing variety of cacti and hanging plants. The greenery is so dense that you can't see past the wall of vegetation.

The westernmost window on the Prince St. side. I go out of my way to walk past these windows regularly, and I'm always disappointed when the shades are down. When I saw that the windows were open on this pass, I had to stop and take pictures.

The middle window on the Prince St. side. How long does it take to water these plants regularly? (Luckily, most of them appear to be water-retaining cacti and bromeliads.) More than a green thumb, one of the Nuchterns has a green hand.

The easternmost window of the Nuchtern House on the Prince St. side. It's a jungle in there!