After years of renting, Jackson Owens and Flora Jin bought a loft in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and it felt like a dream come true. A week or so later, it was more like a nightmare.
A few floors above them there was a gas leak and then an explosion. When the sprinklers turned on, many of the apartments in the building were submerged, including the couple’s new 1,200-square-foot apartment, which they bought for about $1.1 million in July 2021.
“Our unit had severe water damage,” said Mr Owens, 32, a software engineer. “It was quite an introduction to home ownership.”
They moved out, going between hotel rooms and short-term rentals with their two cats. Along the way, they learned more than they wanted to know about property restoration and insurance claims. “We had never even hired a plumber before, let alone dealt with an insurance claim,” said Ms Jin, also 32, a jewelery designer.
Facing their situation, they began to see a potential positive: the opportunity to create a new home that they truly loved. “With the disaster,” Ms. Jin said, “there was an opportunity.”
To take advantage of this opportunity, they hoped to find designers who would create more than a cookie-cutter apartment.
“It was very important for us to work with an up-and-coming architectural firm because we wanted someone who had a stake in the project, rather than just being one of the many other lofts they were renovating,” Ms Jin said. . “So it would be a new and exciting project for them, as well as for us.”
When they saw Sandy Liang’s fashion boutique on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, with its metal-mesh curtains and clothes racks winding through space like a pencil, they knew they had found their architects. They approached Anthony Gagliardi and Dorian Booth, his principals Almost a studioin Brooklyn, who designed the store and found willing partners.
Mr. Gagliardi and Mr. Booth gave the project the full conceptual-design treatment, looking to art for inspiration, and landed on a few key works to serve as reference points: Josef Albers’ book “Interaction of Color,” the irregular shape of Christo Wrapped paintings and a monument with an imposing staircase by Aldo Rossi in Segrate, Italy.
“We tried to apply these concepts of composition to the space they would live in,” Mr. Booth said. In particular, instead of creating a floor plan with the typical right angles, the designers rotated everything so that it was a bit odd, like Albers’ rotating color boxes. Riffing on Rossi’s monument, they envisioned the interior as a miniature urban space — more like a private square than a house.
Just inside the front door, they built a tall sleeping area with shutters that open into the living room for light and air — or to call someone downstairs. “We thought of the facade of the elevated area as a literal building facade,” Mr. Booth said.
From the living room, a wide carpeted staircase rises between cushioned walls finished in textured pink shirasu-kabe plaster, offering steps and seating. At the top is a raised dining room with a tree.
The kitchen is all curves, reminiscent of Christo’s draped fabrics, with a capsule-shaped island and a micro-cement bench that boomerangs around the space before culminating in a built-in desk.
Unconventional materials are featured throughout the loft: cork flooring and floorboards. Marmoleum for kitchen floors. Green carpet surfaces; corrugated aluminum as column cladding. white metal mesh ceilings and railings. and kitchen cabinets in various shades of laminate and tambourine wood doors.
“We talked about these touch-and-feel children’s books,” Mr. Gagliardi said, where the pages have cutouts that reveal sensory surprises. “We were trying to replicate that feeling.”
Construction began in December 2021 and was carried out in phases so that Mr Owens and Ms Jean could move in as quickly as possible. The sleeping loft was completed first, allowing the couple to return a month later. Their contractors then worked around them for over a year, before completing the project in April 2023.
The couple’s budget was $150,000. “We’re over that,” Ms. Jin said, but they didn’t stop to calculate how much. “Sometimes you just want to stop looking.”
And the sprinkler episode still hasn’t been resolved. Coordination with their insurance company and the building’s insurance company is delayed as they negotiate who is responsible for what. In the meantime, they’re relieved to have a home again — especially one they like better than the place they originally bought.
“It was challenging and it affected our lives a lot,” Ms Jin said. However, “we feel really grateful to be the ones living here now.”
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