The life that Manhattan couple Cortney and Robert Novogratz lead is not for the faint of heart. There are six children under the age of 9—including two sets of twins—with all the playdates, pickups, drop-offs, meltdowns, sleepovers, haircuts, teacher conferences, child-care coordinating, doctor's appointments, parties, and bedtime routines that raising a large crew entails. There is their business: transforming dilapidated buildings into upscale residences, a financial and logistical high-wire act that sometimes involves working on four properties at once. And then there are the family's frequent moves, since they typically inhabit the houses they renovate before selling them—along with the furnishings—out from under themselves. (One year they relocated three times.)
But the Novogratzes take their constant state of flux in stride. The parents especially have had plenty of experience with commotion: Robert, raised in Virginia, is from a family of nine children, and Georgia-born Cortney is one of seven. If they have to contend with a wall collapsing or a refrigerator handle breaking because one of the kids has been swinging on it—or a household that begins to stir at 5:15 a.m. and by 6:15 is "utter chaos," in Cortney's words—well, that's a small price to pay for the ability to spend their days en famille, doing what they love. "You can't sweat the small stuff," Cortney explains as she unzips 9-year-old Wolfgang's lunch bag after school to find everything she'd packed that morning still inside.
The couple's first step was renovating a brownstone 10 years ago. Robert, then a stockbroker, hit up a friend, who was an engineer, for construction advice, and he and Cortney went to work on parts of the interior themselves. Once they rented the place to Suzanne Vega, they never looked back, and Robert eventually decided to devote himself full-time to their company, named Sixx in honor of their brood. With each project, the Novogratzes have upped the ante. Walls are now troweled with Venetian plaster, and light fixtures come from shopping sprees in France. While they continue to serve as designers and realtors for their firm, they now subcontract all the construction, which gives them time for things like watching Wolfgang play basketball and leading 8-year-old Bellamy's class on a hard-hat tour of their properties.
