House

Levy Townhouse

Located in the landmarked Greenwich Village Historic District, this five-story townhouse conveys a simple elegance. It is architecturally grand, yet remains very much a home in feeling and function. For the renovation, we excavated a new cellar, extended the rear wall of the house, completely rebuilt the rear façade with all new openings, added a steel and glass greenhouse room, rebuilt the penthouse, decks, and rear skylights, and installed all landmark-approved windows on the front and rear façades.

Working closely with our European clients and considering every detail, we created a townhouse that reflects and accommodates their lifestyle. Our design for the parlor floor provides an openness and scale that are unusual in a townhouse and allowed us to create an urban great room with 11-foot high ceilings, 10-foot high windows, a spacious living area that flows into the kitchen, and a greenhouse dining area that opens onto the rear garden. A two-story high steel and wood bookcase rises from the parlor floor through to the second floor and master suite. The children’s rooms occupy the third floor. The penthouse, which we transformed into a highly customized sanctuary for the client, an author who works at home, has decks on the front and rear of the house. The basement, which opens on the garden, has guest quarters for visiting family, a media room and a kitchenette.

Rosenthal Marino House

The owner of this home near the ocean on the East End of Long island requested that we incorporate the existing house into a new, larger design. We did this by adding a series of new forms linked together by a column-free great room with 16-foot wide pocketing glass doors. A wooden V-shape ceiling visually extends the living room out to the garden and swimming pool. The guest rooms are housed in a 32-foot high tower with the roof deck that provides views of the ocean and the surrounding fields.

We used cedar throughout the house: first as exterior siding; again in striated, block relief as cladding on the chimney both inside and out; and finally as a lattice screen on the guest wing tower to subtly conceal the exterior stair to the roof deck.

Danko Bayer House

Situated on a beautiful hillside in New York’s Catskills Mountains, this project included a complete re-design of an existing house with only the footprint and roofline remaining.

The interior transformation yielded a vast, open kitchen, dining and living space with 20-foot ceilings and exterior views from end to end. The dining area looks onto a large cedar deck, with steps down to a planned pool area. The open kitchen features thick walnut shelving and walnut counters; salvaged barn board siding wraps around the island.

The entrance vestibule provides a view through the house and out onto the “bridge” deck that extends from the master bedroom. Spacious exterior decks around the house take advantage of the mountain vistas across the valley below. The white-washed cement board exterior siding is installed as a rain-screen to allow for continuous insulation and weather proofing. The extensive, sloping property includes beautiful drystone walls and a lower pond with a small bathing house.

Chiat Beach House

This four-bedroom ocean-front house is built around an eighteenth-century Vermont barn frame that was salvaged, restored and re-erected to create the great room with living, dining, and kitchen. A glass and aluminum curtain wall floods the entire east end of the barn with morning light.

The barn and the “addition,” which contains ground-floor bedrooms and a second-floor master bedroom suite, are sited on the property to maximize privacy from the neighbors. Simple materials throughout include clear finished maple cabinetry, American cherry floors, natural aluminum window mullions, and a steel fireplace.

Our client Jay Chiat said to The New York Times Magazine, “I’ve had a lot of nice houses, but this is the first one I feel is really home.”

Von Hoffmann Doyle Farm

This project, on a 750-acre farm an hour outside of Nashville, includes the complete renovation of the circa 1850s farmhouse, a 4,800 sq. ft. addition, and a new guest house/garage.

The original farmhouse (6,500 sq. ft.) stands at the end of a long drive. By carefully siting the addition and guest house, we preserved the understated, bucolic feeling of the approach, while doubling the home’s living space. A rear courtyard bounded by the original house and the two-story addition adds to a feeling of intimacy. The addition includes a large eat-in kitchen and screened porch, and a summer master bedroom with sleeping porch. A small guest house with a below-grade garage stands to the north.

Our client’s commitment to sustainable design informed every aspect of the project. All wood from accessory buildings was reclaimed and used as millwork for the restoration and addition. We stripped and retained all of the house’s original siding detail. The heating and AC system is geothermal and the lighting is LED. We sited the addition to maximize passive solar in the winter and placed windows to encourage cross ventilation in the summer. We worked with the landscape architect to ensure that the new trees on the property provide shade, including a copse of trees to the south of the new kitchen that creates an outdoor dining room.