Custom closets in Tribeca.

Tribeca is the loft district that grew up. The cast-iron buildings between Greenwich and West Streets were warehouses and butter-and-egg houses until the 1980s, when artists started living in them and the conversions began. Most of the residences we build into now are second- or third-generation conversions — apartments that started as 4,000 sq ft open plates and have been carved into the four-bedroom-with-dressing-room layouts the market wants. The result is a kind of closet problem unique to the neighborhood: bedrooms with twelve-foot ceilings but no built-in storage of any kind, walls that are sometimes brick and sometimes hollow drywall on cold-rolled steel, and ducting that runs in places the original architect never imagined.

We have built more dressing rooms in Tribeca than in any other Manhattan neighborhood. The opportunity in a Tribeca conversion is the ceiling: most lofts give us eleven to thirteen feet of vertical, and a dressing room that uses the full height looks like a private library rather than a closet. We pair that with a free-standing island in solid timber, integrated linear lighting on the cornice line, and full-height pier mirrors on the short walls. The drawings are made in three dimensions because the slab above is rarely level — we shim the top plate and scribe the cornice line ourselves on site.

On the practical side, every cast-iron building has a service-elevator regime: we load before 9am, post the freight elevator with the building manager seventy-two hours in advance, and use moving blankets on the lobby floor that the supers know us by.

Tribeca install is run out of the building's service entrance — typically on Hudson, Greenwich, or West Broadway — with a 7am loading-dock window and a building-manager-approved no-parking permit. Most cast-iron co-ops require a certificate of insurance on file forty-eight hours before the truck arrives; we keep one on file at the major buildings (105 Hudson, 56 Leonard, 30 Park Place, 443 Greenwich) and renew it annually. Survey visits are walk-in from the workshop in the Bronx — twenty-four minutes down the FDR.

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.