I do not usually feature apartments that are for sale in the Loft Peeping features but 1) this is not your ordinary loft and 2) these are not your ordinary owners.

Barrie Mandel and Harvey Schneier bought 25 Harrison — one of the nine Federal townhouses between Greenwich and West streets — in 1994, when they had three young kids and had outgrown their open loft on Nassau. “I was beginning to sell real estate then and I saw an ad in The Times for ‘half a house’ in Tribeca — I mentioned it to a colleague who lived in Independence Plaza and she said, ‘there’s only one place that could be.'”

So in 1990, they rented the top two floors of 27A Harrison — the owners spent half the year on Martha’s Vineyard, where they owned an ice cream shop — and when #25 came up for sale, they jumped. It had not changed hands since 1977, when the city offered the townhouses for sale for $47,000, after they were condemned in 1969 as part of the Washington Street Urban Renewal Area and moved off their original sites. (The couple took a mortgage for less than $500,000.)

“It’s a magical story,” Barrie said. “We have pictures of this house being moved on a flatbed truck.”

The place needed work, and they started slowly, but over the course of three decades, they would restore just about everything — within reason. (“This house lived before we did and you honor that,” Barrie said. “Not everything needs a facelift. Very good is very good. Don’t strive for perfection. It’s illusory.”) They would eventually move some walls, replace all the windows, restore the plank floors. They have a bathroom clad in travertine the color of “the most delicious corn on the cob.” But in the meantime, as a young family in a four-story house, “we were absolutely smitten.”

“You know when you have to have something? That’s how it was with this house.”

Over the years they worked with four different architects and made changes as they became apparent. “The place will speak to you if you can live in it first.” They moved the kitchen to the street side so the living room could face the garden in back. (“I have no idea how to cook,” said Barrie. “And my husband knows even less than me. Though he does make scrambled eggs. Good eggs.”)

The house is 20 feet wide and 2900 square feet over four floors; it came with five fireplaces but they covered two. It has a finished basement and a slate backyard. Four bedrooms. Incredible views — both the intimate kind, like the red maple in the back yard, and the expansive kind — you can see the skyscrapers of Hudson Yards from the front windows. And it did what they wanted it to do: become a lively family home for decades.

“People who come here to Tribeca — all common sense tells them they should be in the suburbs,” Barrie says. “But they can’t stand it. It could be Larchmont but it has to be here. They come here for what we have — a neighborhood familial feeling.”

Barrie is still selling real estate, including this house; Harvey is a retired internist who practiced at Columbia Presbyterian for 20 years and then worked in pharmaceuticals for another two decades. They have no plans to leave the city, but they knew it was time to move on. Maybe Lincoln Center? Maybe the Upper East Side near where Barrie had her first career, as a social worker at a settlement house on 88th and First.

“We’ve loved it here. But houses don’t take care of themselves,” Barrie said. “Since we are relatively coherent and healthy, it’s time to get ourselves settled into a different life and start to make memories there.”

“It’s very difficult to do, I will tell you that,” she added. “I come in here and after 30 years, it still makes me happy. Real estate can make you feel safe and warm and all the things. It can do that. This house did that for us.”