Social Workout

Name: Alexandra Auder, husband Nick Nehez, and daughter Lui Nehez
Location: 311 West 11th Street, New York, NY
What: Three story, 2 bedroom, 1830s townhouse
What Else: West Village Yoga!
Years lived in: 4

On West 11th Street in Manhattan, on the third floor of an old brick townhouse famously owned by certain iconic female photojournalist, Alexandra Auder conducts yoga classes in her bedroom. It's a sun drenched, triangular room; neither huge nor tiny, with a working fireplace and a King sized mattress tilted against one wall.

"I know," says Alexandra. "We thought we'd get a Murphy Bed, but then the mattress just sort of fit in this nook. In the evening we flop it down."

I'd arrived a few minutes earlier for the tour, and found myself on the ground floor of the three story home, created as if by someone cutting a wedge off of a tall brick birthday cake for a dear friend — which is kind of how it went down for Alex and her artist husband, Nick Nehez. But I get ahead of myself.

In front of me as I enter is a black banister spiraling upwards. To the left, a kitchen where I wait when Alex calls down that she is just finishing up with a client. It's a cozy, jumbled country affair: Leather couch against brick wall; a long wooden table, made by Nehez, featuring an acute angle at one end that follows the exterior wall of the building; a pot of bright yellow mini daffodils presiding in the sun over a sink full of dishes.

When Auder materializes, in faded bell bottoms, she apologizes in advance for being a bit loopy — which she is not. She's on the third day of a cleanse created by her friend Lya Mojica, she says, starting up the stairs. (Lya, it seems, creates amazing cleanses, and has a stunning yoga practice.) On the second floor landing, Auder stops to close a chalkboard-paint-covered door which leads to her daughter's room. "That gets shut when we're having a class," she says. I check out a collection of black-and-white photos on the wall taken by the famous landlord of Alex and her mom in Topanga Canyon in the 1970s. Mom is a glamorous beauty with bohemian bouffant. Alex is in a sun dress, barefeet dangling off an old couch.

"This works for a certain kind of person," she explains heading up to the third floor. "Sometimes my daughter is running around, or my husband might be cooking downstairs, so the whole place smells like chili. Some people like the idea of coming to do yoga in a family house — it's a real sweet vibe."

In a crunchy place like, say, Berkeley, this scene would seem plausible: Yoga-loving neighbors, a bit of chit chat, a tea kettle whistling, kids playing. But in Manhattan, at the intersection of Jay Z (Spotted Pig) and Julian Schnabel (Palazzo Chupi), really? Such informality, I think, is available only to the very rich, or perhaps to the second generation of some hidden bohemian aristocracy, i.e. people with hereditary rent control, and/or famous friends. Let's go back, then, to those black-and-whites for a moment....

Turns out Alex's mom was known to the rest of the world as Viva, and was a Warhol Superstar — the articulate one who succeeded Edie. Alex's childhood home was the Chelsea Hotel, and her weekly routine featured kirtan chanting sessions with mom and assorted friends. No surprise, then, that Alex hit the yoga curve early. She took her formative classes, and her teacher training, at the original Jivamukti studio. After college at Bard, she opened and ran her own studio in Rhinebeck, New York for six years, before decamping in 2003 with the hubby to L.A. — a move that didn't take. "New York was screaming to us," she says, so back they came in 2005.

If she got to yoga before the rest of her generation, everyone else eventually caught up. "When I moved back to the city, there was this huge yoga explosion," she says. "I didn't want to open my own studio, but it was the only business I knew." By coincidence, Auder had been teaching yoga to her mom's famous photographer friend for years, and the latter had recently completed what can only be called a very star-crossed townhouse renovation, (and would prefer, for that reason, among others, to keep her name quite out of the press thankyouverymuch!) "She said why don't you just rent this place," says Auder. "It was sheer luck, and good timing."

We arrive on the third floor landing to find a carafe of water and a coiled yoga strap set neatly on a sunny window sill — and a vacuum cleaner which she pushes out of sight. I had warned her that the Internet can be tough. "The vacuum wouldn't normally be here," she says. "At least it's a Miele."

Into the studio/bedroom we go. Sun streams through six windows, splashing panes of light on the hardwood. She hangs a brilliant orange hammock across the room, and then waves her hands at the mattress. "My husband has a plan to create a platform that we can pull up and down with ropes and leather straps." It seems progress is slow, though. "New students actually like to put their mat next to the mattress," she says. "It makes them feel safe."

The bed project may be ongoing, but Nehez is redeemed by the handmade wooden cubbies perched above the door, holding blocks and mats. "I can get 12 people in here if I have to," Auder says scanning the room. "At first I charged $40, and would only have six people at a time. I'm known for my hands on adjustments. But then more people wanted to come. Now I charge $25 for first timers, and $30 for drop ins, and we usually have about eight people."

She sits in the hammock, and we chat about living in New York and yoga. She teaches at Kula Yoga Project three days a week and leads classes at West Village Yoga, i.e her bedroom studio, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. "Genny Kapuler has been teaching out of her loft in Soho for years," she notes. "It's full of plants, and it's reminds you of when mothers lived in Soho in the 1970s." Times have changed, clearly. Out the window and below, a very tall woman skips out of the Spotted Pig across the street. "Sometimes I think I should become a papparazzi," she says. "And then you have Palazzo Chupi." She waves at Schnabel's Italiante castle. "I enjoy watching it while I'm teaching. It's beautiful with the sun."

Could there be a more gentrified spot on the planet? And yet, here in this modified in-law apartment, it all feels very grounded. She mentions that her daughter goes to P.S. 3, where she went years ago. 

"I never imagined my daughter would go to the same school I did, or that I'd be a yoga teacher," she muses. Or, no doubt, that she'd be teaching in her bedroom, looking out over an Italian palazzo, and Hoboken.