Park Slope Brownstone

By converting this four-story duplex/duplex brownstone in the Park Slope Historic District into a simplex/triplex configuration, this project enabled a family of four with two work-at-home artists -- an author and a composer -- to re-occupy the house they’d been renting out.

The conversion necessitated a change to the Certificate of Occupancy, a drawn-out bureaucratic process predicated upon building-wide conformance with the life safety components of the most current building codes. Accordingly, a significant portion of the budget went toward achieving compliance. Another chunk went toward new HVAC for the triplex – a saga unto itself demonstrating how Byzantine code requirements may dissuade owners from doing the best work for their property.

While much of the budget was relinquished to achieving the baseline work, we focused remaining resources on a high-impact remodeling of the first floor of the triplex, the piano nobile of the brownstone. We created a visual proscenium consisting of a series of layered, semi-public spaces, beginning at the entry, proceeding through the living, dining, and kitchen areas, and culminating with an expansive view of the rear yard. This idea is reinforced by the staggered pendant lighting fixtures that rise in height as they march toward the exterior.

The vast openness of the first floor was achieved by removing two load bearing walls and creating a new masonry opening in the exterior wall. A steel window wall was chosen for its visual lightness. Its fenestration pays homage to the individual double hung windows formerly occupying the wall.

As for the colors, my client was first working with a palette of whites and then became excited by blue and subsequently orange. My task, in addition to finding the right shades and the materials with which to express them, was to incorporate these colors into the architecture and to appropriately showcase them with simple background neutrals including oak flooring, white Corian, and end grain butcherblock.