Hardwood floors, exposed beams, exposed brick walls, working fireplaces: for many New Yorkers, the elements of a classic townhouse are as appetizing as a dessert buffet at a wedding.
However, terraced houses have their disadvantages. If you’re a couple working from home and planning to start a family, the often narrow widths of these buildings diminish their appeal somewhat. Even a fireplace with a marble mantel becomes a hindrance if what you really need is more storage.
Molly Garber and Braden Pierce were one such couple. They bought a duplex in a 1930 brick townhouse in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, with the intention of one day being “three years old,” as Ms. Garber puts it.
The 1,000 square foot co-op was charming, with a single bedroom and bathroom upstairs and a multipurpose room with a half bathroom downstairs. The open lower floor was partially basement, but rather than giving off a dungeon-like atmosphere, it had windows to two exposures. It was also connected to a small private garden.
“We looked at apartments with similar upstairs and downstairs layouts,” Ms. Garber recalls. “It was the first one where the ground floor didn’t feel like a basement. »
The couple paid $1.25 million for the duplex in 2019 and moved in for a few years, using it as a workplace during and after the pandemic. (Ms. Garber, now 39, works for a digital marketing firm specializing in the arts; Mr. Pierce, 35, is a product manager for a residential solar financing company in South Carolina.) When they had trouble seeing the food they were preparing in the kitchen — the central areas of townhouses are typically dark — they simply flipped a switch.
Then came Mrs. Garber’s pregnancy and, with it, the reminder that (apart from the bathrooms) only one room, on the upper level, had an interior door. According to the cooperative’s regulations, there could not be additional rooms in the apartment. Building a wall to create a quiet refuge for a baby was out of the question. The rules also prohibited converting the lower floor’s half bathroom into a full bathroom.
Work around these restrictions to meet their needs – did we mention they love to entertain too? – transformed into a game of Twister. Luckily, they found Ryan Brooke Thomas, a designer who knew the eight-unit building intimately because she lived on the top floor. Renovations began in April 2023, a month before the couple’s daughter Lillian was born. They were completed the following August, at a cost of $230 per square foot.
Ms. Thomas, director of Kalos Eidos, a multidisciplinary design studio, described the unit she first encountered as having “great bones, but lots of layers on top,” including six or seven wood finishes. different woods. She set out to remove, unify, and remove functionality from discordant elements.
The job required working around several stubborn features—several windows, exposed brick, the fireplace with its white marble mantle, an interior staircase—and finding ways to add storage, which, as could be expected, waiting there, was rare.
Ms. Thomas approached the problem with custom oak trim and an overall color palette to create useful sections, or “zones.”
Upstairs, the layout flows from Lillian’s bedroom to an open kitchen loosely defined by a new stone island, then to a living-dining area with a banquette that leans against the staircase. Cabinets, shelves, and niches are folded into a long row of new furniture that lines a brick wall, connecting multiple areas.
On the ground floor, an oak partition with open shelves separates the adult sleeping area from a combined home office and living room. Here, the ribbon of custom wall units is outfitted with a single desk. (Ms. Garber and Mr. Pierce trade off use of the desk while the other heads to a coworking space.)
Ms. Thomas stressed that in small apartments, the size and placement of furniture must be carefully considered, so that even free-standing, movable pieces acquire the grounded, inevitable feel of architecture.
The couple’s dining table and banquette, for example, were designed to fit precisely into a precise location at the end of the upper tier so that six people could sit comfortably and bodies could maneuver within the surrounding space.
Oak furniture and surfaces brought cohesion to both levels. The upper floor boards were refinished and the lower floor received new matching boards. But to keep the house from looking too woodsy, Ms. Thomas specified a slate blue accent color on the cabinets that is enriched by the natural hue of the brick behind them. The home’s variegated woodwork was painted a glossy, synthetic white.
One of the two small cupboards on the ground floor was sacrificed to the enlargement of the bathroom. The designer repurposed the two permitted fixtures (a toilet and a sink) and specified sage green tile and cabinetry.
The couple doesn’t blame Lillian for having easy access to the tub in her nursery. “It’s a little inconvenient, but it’s much better to have the full tub on the baby’s floor,” Pierce said.
It would be a terrible experience, he added, to carry a wet baby up and down the stairs every day.
Living Small is a biweekly column that explores what it takes to live a simpler, more sustainable or more compact life.
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News Source : www.nytimes.com
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