JEWEL STREET
The project is located on a quiet street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn – just beyond a formerly industrial zone, now home to several television studios. The wood-framed rowhouse was built in the 1930’s as Brooklyn was rapidly expanding. The standard Brooklyn rowhouse plan is “standard” because it works – it efficiently organizes the narrow form into a clear hierarchy driven by proximity to sunlight and to a circulation core. As such, rowhouse plans offer a programmatic determinacy that offer its occupants little space for their lives to take a different form: perhaps a bedroom could be converted to an office space, but where’s joy in that?
Jewel Street offers an alternative way to inhabit such a form: by linking each floor around a central light well, and by pulling back the ground floor plate to reveal the cellar, the three levels of the house are interlinked, and their boundaries blurred such that the rowhouse hierarchy evaporates, leaving behind a productive ambiguity and room for unexpected possibilities.
Our brief was deceptively simple: clarify the plan and provide communication between each level. The house was designed for a young family, such that each level provides a variety of scales and degrees of intimacy. The project comprises a series of spaces interlinked by a light-well, which brings sunlight down and into the deepest levels of the house, including the excavated cellar and basement levels. From sweeping, double-height rooms that open unto a landscaped rear yard, to private alcoves washed with sunlight, to the new mezzanine space with custom oak shutters, the house offers a level of flexibility and spatial cohesion rare to the townhouse form.
Construction: Hatchet (@hatchet.nyc)
Architecture: Overhead (@ovhd.nyc)
Interior Design: Studio Oink (@studiooink)
