Custom closets in Upper East Side.

The Upper East Side is the neighborhood the dressing room was invented for. The pre-war co-ops along Park Avenue, Fifth, and the cross-streets in the Seventies and Eighties were built between 1920 and 1940 to a small set of standard plans — the classic six, classic seven, classic eight — and almost without exception they include a primary bedroom with an adjoining dressing room or large reach-in. The drawings the original architects made are still useful: ceiling heights of 9'6" to 10'2", plaster on cinder-block partition walls, herringbone floors, and a wiring chase that runs along the perimeter and almost never where you want it.

What we typically build on the Upper East Side is a primary dressing room that respects the original architecture — painted millwork with shadow-line reveals, brass hardware aged to a soft warm tone, fluted-glass doors on the upper cabinets so the light from the room reaches the back of the closet. Pre-war walls are rarely square — three-quarters of an inch out of plumb over an eight-foot run is normal — so the cornice and base are scribed on site, and the back face of every panel is shimmed to take a face that reads straight from a meter away.

Co-op boards on the Upper East Side are particular about installation timing and insurance. We submit alteration agreements through the building's managing agent, carry $5M of general liability that names the corporation as additional insured, and run install only between 9am and 4pm Monday through Friday. No weekend work.

Service-elevator only, ground-floor or basement loading dock. We hold COIs on file at most of the prewar co-ops between 60th and 96th Street along Park and Fifth. NYC no-parking permits are pulled by the workshop three days in advance and posted by the install crew at 6am on the morning. The drive from the Bronx is fifteen minutes via the FDR 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.