Custom closets in West Village.

The West Village is the most architecturally varied of the neighborhoods we work in regularly. Townhouses on Bank, Bedford, and Charles dating to the 1830s sit next to cast-iron warehouses, mews carriage houses, and post-war infill. Each gives us a different problem. The federal townhouses are the tightest — ceiling heights of 8'2" on the parlor floor are common, the original stair runs through what would be the dressing room, and the brick party walls between houses are never plumb.

Carriage-house projects are the ones we love most. A typical West Village carriage house is twenty-five feet wide, three stories tall, with an open ground floor where horses used to live and bedrooms above. The closet stock is essentially zero. We design entire walls of storage — open hanging on metal pegs, paneled millwork concealing the mechanicals, scribe-fit cornices that follow the irregular plaster — that read as original to the building. The trick is the scribe. Every horizontal datum is laser-checked on site, then the cornice and base are cut to follow the actual line of the wall, not the nominal one.

Federal doors are a small but recurring project. A West Village townhouse will often have six original four-panel doors on the parlor floor with brass rim locks and porcelain knobs. When a household renovates, they want the new closet and pantry doors to read as the original ones. We mill them to the original detailing and hang them with concealed European hinges, so the room reads federal but the doors close like contemporary ones.

Townhouse install means street-level delivery — no freight elevator. We pull NYC no-parking permits for the curb in front of the residence three days in advance and post them at 6am on the morning. The crew works from a single truck parked street-side; protective ramping over stoops is in our standard kit. Most West Village blocks are landmarked, so any alteration of an exterior door requires a separate Landmarks Preservation Project filing — we coordinate that with the homeowner's architect.

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.