RESIDENTIAL
HOUSE V
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
The neighborhood context for this large suburban villa consists of boxy houses with vaguely Mediterranean associations. An obvious tension exists between the desires of the inhabitants for large, grand houses and the very limited size of the lots available. The basic form and materials of the house, stone, brick, stucco and clay roof tile, are common to the neighborhood context. To complete the project, we provided interior design services including the custom design of nearly all of the furniture. The clients asked for a house enriched in form, surface ornament and color. Through the manipulation of scale and traditional ornament, a potentially intimidating environment becomes intimate.
The stair hall rises through the house, topped by a bronze and art glass laylight; the weatherproofing function is satisfied by a clear-glazed skylight at the roof. The design of the laylight recalls late nineteenth-century examples, with its mostly clear edges and brilliantly colored band at the center. The stair itself, which is set free from the wall at the first floor, functions as an independent element in the hall.
The entertaining rooms on the ground floor, the living and dining rooms, straddle the entry foyer, with its grand stair. Beyond the stair hall are the paneled formal library and den, which is more private and casual in character. This organization of rooms allows for relatively long vistas through the house, creating the illusion of greater size. The private hall on the second floor is also quite generous in width, fostering this illusion. Just as the hall organizes the long axis of the house, the stair hall controls the short axis, serving as the vertical organization element.
In the cellar, in addition to the requisite mechanical equipment and storage rooms, a half-court basketball court and home theater complete the entertainment portion of the house. The theater doubles as a playroom and billiard room, and the gym can, through the use of the theatrical lighting system, be transformed into a space for parties.
WILLOW COURT
QUEENS, NEW YORK
WITH SWANKE HAYDEN CONNELL ARCHITECTS
This Assisted Living Residence was built on an abandoned parking garage, retaining the existing lower level structure. The column grid dictated the floor heights in the podium, the tower placement and its overall size. Eighty-four Studio and One-Bedroom Apartments were created in the tower, with the services associated with a residence of this type located in the podium.
The site, at the edge of Flushing Meadow Park offers long views both to Nassau County to the East and Manhattan to the West. The units are quite small, but the overscale windows provide a real feeling of openness and connection with the larger world beyond.
The multicolor brick enlivens the regular facades, as do the corner windows and end bays. The more insistent striping of the podium reinforces its allied yet different function.
ADDITION TO HISTORIC COTTAGE
TUXEDO PARK, NEW YORK
Financier Pierre Lorillard and the architect Bruce Price created Tuxedo Park out of several thousand acres of rocky woodland in 1886. It was to be a private hunting and fishing club, complete with clubhouse, close to New York City. Part of the original plan was a series of cottages, designed by Price, owned by the Tuxedo Park Association, and leased or sold to club members. Over the years, many of them disappeared, victims of fire and changing architectural tastes; some dozen or so of the original structures remain. With their shingled walls and roofs and often sitting on fieldstone bases, the cottages harmonized with the forest landscape. Quite modest and informal for their time, the cottages at Tuxedo Park embody the principles of the American shingle style of the late nineteenth century.
For all their obvious virtues, the original cottages could not respond to changes in social structure which began to erode the availability of servants to manage households, and particularly to deal efficiently with kitchens one full floor below dining rooms. The charge to the architect was to create a new kitchen where once there had been a butler's pantry, and to enlarge the building to accommodate an adjacent breakfast area.
The addition is intended to blend with the existing house and to look "as if it were always there". The materials are consistent with the rest of the house; painted shingles, wood windows. Inside, the new kitchen cabinets are all natural cherry. The large serliana anchors the addition on the elevation and fosters the illusion that the breakfast pavilion sits in, rather than next to, the garden.
151 WEST 17TH STREET
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
WITH SWANKE HAYDEN CONNELL ARCHITECTS
Two new 12-story buildings contain 51 luxury condominium apartment units. The 140,000 square foot complex includes underground parking and apartments ranging in size from 1,100 square-foot one-bedroom units to 3,500 square foot three-bedroom penthouses.
Zoning suggested the twin tower form that in turn suggests apartment buildings along Central Park West. The zoning resolution forced the towers back from the street. This intentionally helps to maintain the strong neighborhood cornice line of about ninety feet. The floor to ceiling windows set up a binary window/wall relationship unusual in apartment houses in New York. The resulting “columns” of brick evoke without mimicking the bay structure of the neighboring loft buildings. In these ways the industrial heritage of Chelsea is honored without resorting to formal imitation.
At the base of the building, the orange brick gives way to Ohio Sandstone. The canopy, like a long wing, extends along most of the street frontage, announcing the entry, yet related in size to the entire building. From the street, the passerby can see directly through the lobby into the garden courtyard, beyond.
The lobby itself draws for its inspiration from some of the Italian and Latin American Design of the 50’s and 60’s. The red stucco veneziana wall behind the custom, ebonized wood concierge desk belongs to the Italian tradition of Carlo Scarpa and Gio Ponti. The terrazzo floor recalls Roberto Burle Marx’s sidewalk pattern for the Copacabana beach in Rio and the garden design, with its undulating beds of ferns also echoes his use of plant material for pattern and color. Back-lit onyx fills the storefront wall opposite the concierge desk, lending an air of mysterious richness to the lobby.
The apartments are intended to look and feel loft-like. The wood floors, simple trim and open kitchens reinforce the feeling of a barely escaped industrial past. While of very fine quality materials, the detailing is simple and straightforward.
35 EAST 75TH STREET
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
WITH SWANKE HAYDEN CONNELL ARCHITECTS
Many New York City apartment houses are entered above the lobby level, requiring ramps for accessibility. Furthermore, over the years the lobby of 35 East 75th Street became cluttered and aesthetically incoherent. The intent of the project was to create a ramp that doubles as a piece of furniture; a presence in the lobby that does not intrude. An underutilized exterior planter was removed and the space it occupied reclaimed for a seating area near the windows. The doorman's station was concealed in a paneled wall, further reducing the visual clutter. Fine materials and an attention to mid-century detail complete the composition.
TRANSFORMATIVE ADDITION
SANDS POINT, NY
In the early 1960's, large estates all over Long Island were broken up into subdivisions. In many cases, the resulting houses were large ranches of little architectural distinction, poaching on the great estate's land; interlopers. Along one edge of this property is the alee of trees which marked the original entry drive to the waterside estate house. The newly‑shingled residence now has the appearance not of a brick‑veneered interloper but rather that of a grand version of an estate outbuilding. This residence, with a view of Long Island Sound, is a "makeover" renovation; the rooms already had generous proportions in plan, but the ceilings were barely eight feet high. While preserving the basic arrangement of rooms, the asked us to open the house more to the view and the morning sun and provide a screened outdoor eating area. To that end, we altered, removed or refinished every interior and exterior surface, and we appended an addition to the house on the water side.
The addition consists of a strip ten feet deep across the kitchen, den and library, a screenhouse for outdoor summer dining, and an addition to the dining room to balance the entry front. The terrace was reworked, and a new fence built. The ceiling heights under the triple gabled roof vary from eleven to twenty‑one feet. The entire building is covered with cedar shingles.
The high wall is very flat, with the minimum of trim to interrupt its height. This serves to emphasize the sheared‑off quality of the spaces within. The wall slices through them, even interrupting the cornice that runs around the other sides of the new rooms, underlining the thin, taut quality of the shingle wall
5 RIVERSIDE DRIVE
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Built in 1940, at the tail end of the Depression, 5 Riverside Drive reflects the prevailing design currents of the period. The ornament and massing reflect a combination of the Art Deco and Classical. At that time, those seemingly antithetical styles frequently were employed on the same project, creating a modern classicism, ornament freely used and mixed toward a theatrical end.
The original lobby featured an elaborately patterned floor, since obscured by ceramic tile. A small portion of that floor remains near the entry and served as one of the cues for the proposal. Inspiration also came from Dorothy Draper, whose office worked on the lobby in the early 1950's.
The black and white marble floor expands upon the pattern established at the entry. Many of the decorative elements already in place remain, wreathed niche and marble bust, benches near the entry, marble door casings, and painted metal radiator covers. On the walls, an elaborately bordered wallpaper with a "pattern all over" field reorganizes and rationalizes the main lobby with its haphazardly located doors. A new doorman's station which integrates the house telephone, replaces a retrofitted cabinet. New light fixtures made by the same manufacturer who made the originals complement the new ornament.
The furniture in the lobby was selected with an eye to both durability and the ruling spirit of the project, the last period when modern and classical design principles could happily coexist.
NAPANOCH RENOVATION
NAPANOCH, NEW YORK
Built by a masonry contractor as a weekend retreat early in the 1980’s, this residence sits at the head of a large meadow overlooking the Rondout Reservoir in Ulster County, New York. By raising the roof, adding dormers and a small stair hall and replacing the painted brick with siding, the architects transformed the bunker-like building into a three-bedroom, two-bath cottage. Placing the stair in the addition at the roadside end allows for possible future expansion without disruption to the newly completed renovation.
The architectural form and details of the exterior echo the local vernacular; clapboard siding, double-hung windows, simple, flat exterior trim. The dignified and cheerful color palette, blue-gray with black accents and windows, reflects the personality of the owners and serves as a reminder to passersby of its transformation.
The interior welcomes sunlight through the oversized windows. Trim was kept to a minimum to emphasize the continuity of space from room to room. The position of the stair at the end of the house created a new room, celebrating that movement through space, and providing new ways to look out to the landscape.
SANDS POINT ADDITION
SANDS POINT, NEW YORK
Sometime between its construction in the mid 1960’s and the late 1990’s, this large residence lost its Living Room. Renovations to the Kitchen and Dining Room effectively eliminated the family entertaining area of the original house. The swimming pool, built by a previous owner had only a tenuous relationship to the house and gardens. The addition, in a restrained Federal Style attempted to extend the house to the rear, form a side wall for the pool, and allow for the extension of an existing bluestone patio.
The clearly two story mass with the single story “saddlebags” owes a debt to Colonial and Adamesque buildings like the Redwood Library in Newport, which in turn looked to European models for its inspiration. The irony of a library form reserved for what is essentially a TV room was not lost on the owners.