Custom closets in Park Slope.

Park Slope brownstones run wider than the ones in Brooklyn Heights — twenty-two to thirty feet is normal, and a few of the houses along Prospect Park West go to forty. The wider lot means a fuller program: a parlor floor with both a formal dining room and a working pantry, a garden floor with a family kitchen and a mudroom by the back door, and bedrooms upstairs that can take a proper dressing room.

What we build most in Park Slope is the working pantry and the mudroom. A Park Slope pantry typically sits between the kitchen and the dining room on the parlor floor — a six-by-ten room with glass-fronted dry-goods storage, drawer-pull spice racks, a stone landing for hot pans, and a second sink. Pocket doors close it off when guests are over. The mudroom is the room by the back door, off the kitchen, where the family comes in from the playground or from getting the kids from school: hooks at three heights, a bench long enough to unlace boots on, and a single drawer for keys, phones, and the day's mail.

Park Slope has a particular kind of household — children of school age, a stroller, a dog, weekend bicycles — and the storage program is sized to that. We work hard not to over-build. The temptation in a brownstone is to fit every wall; the better job is to leave the rooms breathing and concentrate the millwork where the household actually lives.

Street-level delivery off the brownstone's wide stoop. We pull NYC no-parking permits for the truck's curb three days in advance. The grade between Fifth Avenue and Prospect Park West is steep, which means we choose the loading side based on the house number — uphill or downhill of the stoop. Bronx-to-Park-Slope is thirty-two minutes via the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway off-peak.

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.