Apartment Envy: The Rocking-House Builder

New York Times on the Web Real Estate, September 7, 2001

	Philip Greenberg / The New York Times Bill Hedberg and his girlfriend Jennifer Capriccio in his studio, Gyrotonics on the Hudson. Life on the Hudson (Slide Show)

Bill Hedberg likes to move. The 42-year-old Hedberg, who walks, jaunts up and down steps and sits with an easy, straight posture, has been a modern dancer since the age of 20, working for the renowned company of Elisa Monte and David Brown. Evidenced by the international knick-knacks displayed around his home, he loves to travel and tour. He has also spent the past 15 years teaching Gyrotonics, a form of exercise that, like Pilates, uses machines that strengthen and stretch the body with rotational motions. Even his soft-spoken manner and magnetic blue eyes give the impression of a simmering activity underneath.

Hedberg's home encapsulates the constant shifting that is native to his soul, not least because of the fact that it is constantly shifting. Or rocking, to be more exact.

Hedberg's home rests on the water, and while I know this intellectually, I don't realize it until I first sit on one of his Gyrotonics stools and find myself feeling a little nauseated. Then, I begin to feel an undulation, which makes me notice the gentle swaying and light ringing of the multitudes of wind chimes he has hanging from the ceiling. And all that rocking is multiplied many times over by the floor-to-ceiling wall mirrors he has facing each other in the main room of his boat.

It is a dizzying effect to say the least.

For Hedberg, creating his home was both a dizzying and exhausting experience. Two years ago, he decided to leave his comfortable one-bedroom in Chelsea and move into what was originally a freight container holding a pile of rust iron and an 18-inch-deep pool of stagnant water. For eight months, he says, he spent $7,000 and 12-14 hours a day, or "as many as I could stay awake," removing the gunk and the 20'x40' container's crossbeams (which amounted to four-and-a-half tons of steel and one-and-a-half tons of iron), and putting in floorboards, carpeting, ceilings, walls and plumbing with the help of a friend, a talented gymnast from Uzbekistan.

What possessed him to commit to such a Herculean task was, what he bluntly calls, his mid-life crisis. He had been teaching Gyrotonics for fifteen years when his teacher closed the studio, giving Hedberg two weeks' notice and no severance pay.

"I came here to do the proverbial sitting on the dock at the edge of the bay," he says, "when I came to the conclusion to build this studio and these machines developed by my mentor."

The result is Hedberg's current red-carpeted, river-dwelling home, which doubles as his not-for-profit studio Gyrotonics on the Hudson, plus a nearby container that has been converted into a woodworking shop for building Gyrotonics machines.

Much of the first 800-square-foot space is taken up with the Gyrotonics equipment -- even down to the wall decorations, which consist of equipment pieces made from exotic woods. In back, Hedberg has a small, nondescript bedroom, as well as a small kitchen, which doubles as a bathroom. The second container is devoted completely to the woodshop and, therefore, is filled with wood, carpentry equipment and pieces for the wind chimes, which Hedberg makes.

Living in a freight container is a unique idea, but one that is unlikely to be copied by many. Hedberg points out, water may support his home, but it is also his greatest enemy. Every four to six weeks, the boat springs a leak, due to 80 years of gentle lapping by the river. Hedberg and I crawl onto his floor-bed to peer into the back of his closet: a patch of epoxy covers up holes in the wall. A few faint trickles of water are visible below the patches.

In winter, the river creates another problem for him. Yes, he has padding underneath his red carpet, but in winter, even the thickest padding won't keep out the cold of the water underneath or the chill of the wind up above. "This is not the most fun place to live," he says with an ironic smile. "It's a wonderful place to visit."

The other downside, which I point out as sweat trickles down my face, is that even though the boat is always moving, the air is not. The container has no windows. So, on a sunny, breezy, non-humid summer day, the air inside is stiflingly humid, thick and heavy.

But none of this seems to drag Hedberg down. In fact, he has the lightness of a man in love. Hedberg, who was divorced six years ago, tells me, "The lady I fell in love with [after the divorce], last night informed me that she wants to live with me. I think she's crazy." Calling himself a "hopeless romantic," he says, "I have to raise the bar for 'the lady,' as I call her." After having finally installed his own toilet last year, he is now undertaking the construction of a shower for "the lady," since he doesn't want to force her to shower in sports clubs, as he has been doing.

While he is making all these improvements, Hedberg emphasizes that his current home is a temporary one. "I don't want the rest of my life to pale in comparison to the first part," he says. He's already got his mind on his future moves: when asked about the souvenirs he has displayed on a ledge on the wall, he rattles off names of foreign lands he has toured, such as the Sahara, Taiwan and India, and says, "I put [the souvenirs] up there to remind myself I won't be here forever."

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