Custom aquariums are popular for two reasons, interior designers say. One is that upscale nightclubs, restaurants and boutique hotels have been installing them, which gives homeowners the me-too idea. Another is that, among people of means, a dazzling aquarium is one of the last surefire ways to impress their peers.
Christopher Stevens, a Manhattan interior designer, said he has worked several giant fish tanks into residential projects at the request of clients. “They have a collection of cars, of motorcycles, of art, they have three dogs,” Mr. Stevens said. “It’s like, ‘What else, what’s the next thing to wow my friends?’ It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d see in high-end interior design, but that’s being reconsidered.”
[...]
It was Mr. Caparatta who suspended a 700-gallon aquarium from the ceiling of a town house apartment in the West Village owned by Richard Wise and Andre Jones. The filled tank weighs at least 6,000 pounds and has cost the couple some $200,000 in equipment and service.
“At night, we sit in the living room and sort of get lost in it, instead of the television set,” said Mr. Jones, 40, who owns a construction company, Wise Builders LLC, with Mr. Wise. “It’s always the centerpiece of the party.”
The couple keeps bags of brine shrimp and sardinelike fish called silversides in their freezer drawer, next to the Häagen-Dazs and Lean Cuisines. “We feed the fish once a day,” Mr. Jones said. The equipment needed to support the huge aquarium — pumps, pipes, chillers — occupies a walk-in closet as well as part of a roof deck.
[...]
Their three-year-old tank has a salt-water coral reef filled with catfish, tangs, pink damsels and a two-foot eel that rarely shows itself. “Don’t ask me the names of the fish,” he said. “Joe gives them to me, and then I make up my own.”
He added: “At first, when we lost fish, we’d be all traumatized. Now we’re not quite as traumatized.”
Their apartment is on the market for $16.9 million, and some potential buyers have expressed interest in keeping the aquarium, while others have said they would want to remove it. Meanwhile, Mr. Wise and Mr. Jones have bought a new place nearby and are considering jellyfish for the dining room.
“We went on vacation to Fort Lauderdale and stayed at the W, and they had a tank with all jellyfish,” Mr. Jones said. “That’s like living art to me.”
Jellyfish tanks are even more expensive and difficult to build than fish tanks, said Justin Muir, owner of City Aquarium, a Brooklyn-based rival to Manhattan Aquariums. For one thing, jellyfish have to be fed live food every day.
But “some people are like, ‘O.K., $5,000 every month to take care of the tank, plus $100,000 cost of the tank — I’m cool with that,’ ” he said.
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As Mr. Wilzig likes to tell visitors, his lighting system uses the same software as that of a professional rock concert or a Broadway show. “The whole essence of the house was to be push-button color-changing,” Mr. Wilzig said. “The apotheosis of that was to take the fish themselves and have them be swimming in whatever color you want.”
One of the best colors is yellow, he said, because the fish really stand out, but he likes others too. “When you hit the button for red, all of a sudden it’s like the surface of Mars — red fish swimming over a red planet. When you hit white, it’s like the fish are swimming over an arctic ice floe.”
[...]
“The tank is like my life force,” said Mr. Volpe, 61, a master scuba diver who got the tank last year. “It’s endless pleasure and satisfaction. I’ll stare at the tank until 2 o’clock in the morning.”
The people who service tanks like this sometimes must go to extraordinary lengths. Mr. Robinson’s aquarium man, Bill Hamel of Looking Glass Aquariums in Orlando, brings 350 gallons of distilled salt water every four weeks to change the water — something that costs Mr. Robinson about $500 each time.
Mark Collier, who owns Custom Marine Aquaria in Scottsdale, Ariz., once built a 30-foot-long aquarium into the floor of someone’s game room, which contained a pool table, big-screen TV and “water wall” that gave the illusion that water was cascading into the aquarium (it wasn’t). Total installation cost for the aquarium alone: $200,000.
To clean the tank, he had to dive into it, wearing a cord around his ankle that his partner could use to pull him out if need be. “I would basically kind of crawl through the aquarium and back myself out again,” Mr. Collier said.
The aquarium is no longer in use, he added, as a bank has since foreclosed on the house.
[...]
“I fell in love with it,” said Mr. Gosling, 42, who owns a supply business called Gosco Valves. “Every person who comes into the house comments on how cool it is.”
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