Hardwood floors, beamed ceilings, exposed brick walls, working fireplaces — for many New Yorkers, the elements of a classic dollhouse are as off-putting as a dessert buffet at a wedding.
However, terraced houses have their drawbacks. If you’re a work-from-home couple planning a family, the often narrow widths of these buildings somewhat diminish their appeal. Even a marble-topped fireplace becomes a hindrance if what you really need is more storage.
Molly Garber and Braden Pierce were one such couple. They bought a maisonette in a 1930s brick townhouse in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, with the intention of ”making it three,” as Ms. Garber put it.
The 1,000-square-foot co-op was a charmer, with a single bedroom and bath upstairs and a utility room with a half bath downstairs. The single-plan lower floor was partly lower, but instead of breathing a dungeon atmosphere, it had windows in two openings. It was also connected to a small, private garden.
“We looked at apartments with a similar upstairs-downstairs layout,” Ms. Garber recalls. “This was the first one where the bottom floor didn’t look like a basement.”
The couple paid $1.25 million for the duplex in 2019 and settled in for a few years, using it as a workspace during and after the pandemic. (Ms. Garber, now 39, works for a digital marketing firm that specializes in the arts; Mr. Pierce, 35, is the product manager for a solar home financing company in South Carolina.) When they struggled to see the food they were preparing in the kitchen – central parts of houses are usually dim – they just flipped a light switch.
Then came Mrs. Garber’s pregnancy and, with it, the reminder that (besides the bathrooms) only one room, on the upper level, had an interior door. According to cooperative regulations, there could be no additional bedrooms in the apartment. Raising a wall to create a quiet sanctuary for an infant was out of the question. The rules also prohibited converting the downstairs half bathroom to a full bathroom.
Maneuver around these limitations to meet their needs — did we mention they also like to have fun? — turned into a game of Twister. Conveniently, they found Ryan Brooke Thomas, a designer who knew the eight-unit building intimately because he 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 a square foot.
Mrs. Thomas, who is its director Good Kind, a multidisciplinary design studio, described the unit it first came across as having “great bones, but lots of layers on top,” including six or seven different wood finishes. It set out to strip, unify, and extract functionality from incompatible components.
The job required working around a lot of persistent entities—lots of windows, exposed brick, the fireplace with its white marble mantle, an interior staircase—and finding ways to add storage, which was predictably in short supply.
Ms. Thomas attacked the problem with custom oak and a general color palette to create purposeful sections or “zones.”
Upstairs, the layout slides from Lillian’s room to an open kitchen loosely defined by a new stone-topped island to a sitting and dining area with a dinette abutting the staircase. Cupboards, shelves and alcoves fold into a large bank of new cabinets lining a brick wall, bridging multiple zones.
Downstairs, an oak partition with open shelving separates the adults’ sleeping area from a combined home office and living room. Here, the ribbon of custom wall units is fitted with a single desk. (Ms. Garber and Mr. Pierce swap office use, while the other goes to a co-working space.)
Ms. Thomas pointed out that in small apartments, the size and placement of furniture must be considered so carefully that even independent, mobile pieces take on the anchored, inevitable sense of architecture.
The couple’s dining room and dining room, for example, were designed to fit precisely into a precise location at the end of the upper floor, so that six people could be seated comfortably and bodies could meander through the surrounding space.
Oak furniture and surfaces brought coherence to the two levels. The upstairs boards were repaired and the downstairs got new boards to match. But to keep the house from looking too oaky, Ms. Thomas specified a slate-blue color on the cabinetry that’s enhanced by the natural shade of the brick behind it. The house’s variegated wood paneling was painted a bright, synthetic white.
One of the two small downstairs closets was sacrificed to the powder room extension. The designer reoriented the two permitted fixtures (toilet and sink) and specified sage-green tile and cabinets.
The couple does not disturb Lillian in her nursery easy access to the bathtub. “It’s a bit of a nuisance, but it’s much better to do the full bath on the baby’s floor,” Mr Pearce said.
It would be a sad experience, she added, to carry a wet baby up and down every day.
Living Small is a bi-weekly column that explores what it takes to live a simpler, more sustainable or more compact life.
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