Custom closets in Brooklyn Heights.

Brooklyn Heights is the first landmarked district in New York City, and it shows. The brownstones on Pierrepont, Remsen, and Joralemon were built between 1840 and 1880 to a small set of standard widths — twenty, twenty-two, and twenty-five feet — with the typical plan of a parlor floor over a garden floor, two upstairs bedrooms, and a single rear bedroom. The closet stock is original to the period, which is to say almost nothing.

The parlor floor is where the library typically goes. We build floor-to-ceiling shelving on at least one wall — usually the wall opposite the marble mantle, which sets up a reading axis across the room — with a brass library ladder on a rail. Many parlor-floor projects include a small bar at the far end, integrated into the same wall of millwork, with a stone counter and a copper sink. The ceiling height on a parlor floor is typically 11'6", which gives us the room to do shelving in two stacks separated by a horizontal datum.

The garden floor is where the reach-ins live. Bedrooms at the back of the garden floor are narrow — sometimes nine feet wide — with original windows facing the rear garden and a single closet door that the builder added in the 1920s. We fit the entire wall opposite the window as a run of reach-ins behind paneled doors, with the same shadow-line reveal as the original baseboards. The room reads as having a wall, not a wall of closets.

Townhouse install — street-level delivery, NYC no-parking permits posted three days in advance. The crew loads through the parlor-floor door and ramps over the stoop. Brooklyn Heights is fully landmarked, so any alteration to the exterior front face — including the front door, the stoop railing, and the parlor windows — requires LPC review. The drive from the Bronx workshop is twenty-eight minutes off-peak via the Brooklyn Bridge.

Every project is milled at the Bronx workshop — a 14,000 sq ft workshop on the East River — and installed by the same crew that built it. We do not subcontract the install.