A hugely popular Brooklyn bakery made its Manhattan debut this week with a soft launch in a West Village storefront it signed a lease for last year.
L’Appartement 4F, which since its 2022 opening in Brooklyn Heights has had lines wrapped around the block for its hand-rolled croissants, started testing out its new kitchen at 119 W. 10th St., selling and handing out samples of freshly baked goods from the window.
The owners of the bakery, husband-and-wife duo Ashley and Gautier Coiffard, inked a deal last year to occupy the ground floor of the 3-story West Village building between Sixth and Greenwich avenues — the former home of late food industry heavyweight James Beard. He bought the brick rowhouse, built in 1899, in 1959 and used the kitchen for his cooking school, according to information from the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. The famous chef sold the building in 1974 and moved to 167 W. 12th St., which now serves as the headquarters for the James Beard Foundation.
Records show that the property’s current owner is private equity firm Derby Copeland Capital, headquartered in Midtown South. Jesse Hutcher, managing partner and chief investment officer, signed the deed in 2022, acquiring the building for $4.5 million.
Coiffard told Crain’s Thursday that she and her husband don’t yet have a grand-opening date or hours of operation for their West Village location. For now they are just doing “test bakes” at random. There’s no sign yet adorning the nondescript building, which sits within the Greenwich Village Historic District, that identifies the bakery, but customers already seem to be lining up.
“The cat’s out of the bag a little bit,” she said. “We’re technically not really open. We’re just saying hi to the neighborhood and getting to know the community.”
Coiffard declined to say how much she and her husband are paying in rent for the duration of their 10-year lease, or how much they spent to renovate the space to accommodate a proper commercial kitchen, but retail space in the neighborhood appears to go for anywhere between $60 and $582 per square foot, according to the independent commercial real estate website LoopNet.
The new bakery, which sits below a duplex apartment on the second and third floors, will be for takeout only and offer the same fare as the original Brooklyn shop, Coiffard said.
Derby Copeland Capital did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
