The avenue of mansions, the carriage house behind it, and the loft near the school.

Clinton Hill is not one kind of housing arranged along one kind of street, which is what makes it interesting to draw for. On Clinton and Washington Avenues you find freestanding and semi-detached mansions from the years when this was among the grandest addresses in Brooklyn — Italianate, Second Empire, Romanesque Revival, Queen Anne, set back behind front gardens, several of them built by the Pratt family and now owned by institutions. Behind them, on Waverly and the narrow blocks running north, sit carriage houses and former stables that were converted to dwellings decades ago. On the side streets between, Greene and Gates and Cambridge Place, the ordinary Brooklyn brownstone row does what it does everywhere. Toward Myrtle and the Navy Yard there are industrial buildings turned into apartments and studios, and around the campus a steady population of designers, faculty and students in floor-throughs. Four different storage problems inside a district you can walk across in fifteen minutes.

The mansions come with the most room and the least closet. A house drawn in the eighteen-seventies for a household with staff put clothing in wardrobes and trunks, not in built-in casework, and it gave the square footage instead to parlors, a stair hall you could hold a reception in, and ceilings near twelve feet on the parlor floor. The move upstairs is almost always the same: the small back bedroom, the sewing room, or the old box room over the kitchen wing becomes the dressing room, and the primary bedroom stops carrying furniture it was never proportioned for. Ceiling height is the free dimension here, so cases run to within a few inches of the cornice, with the daily rails at reach and the seasonal work — the coats, the luggage, the garment bags — banded above and reached by a library ladder rather than a stepstool. Where the room keeps original trim, we scribe to it and stop the casework short of the plaster cornice rather than cutting into it. Nothing about the joinery should announce itself as new; it should read as a fitting the house happened not to receive.

The rowhouses on the side streets are the familiar Brooklyn problem at its most honest. Twenty feet wide or a little less, three or four floors, a stair that eats the middle of the plan, and per floor perhaps one shallow closet that was cut in during a later renovation and holds a season and a half of one person's clothing. Plaster over wood lath moves; a hundred and forty years of settlement leaves runs that lose half an inch or more from one end of a wall to the other, and door heads on the same floor that disagree. So the work goes vertical and it goes into the leftovers: a wardrobe wall built along the party wall in the primary bedroom, a linen press on the stair landing where there is a stub of wall nobody has used since the house was built, drawers under the parlor stair, a coat run at the garden entrance that takes strollers and boots without turning the hall into a mudroom. Original woodwork — butternut, oak, sometimes cherry, often with a shellac finish worth keeping — sets the vocabulary for panel rhythm and rail heights, and we match to it rather than beside it. The prewar joinery problem is the same one here as on the Manhattan side of the river, only in wood the Manhattan buildings did not get.

Carriage houses and the converted industrial buildings ask for something different again. A carriage house was drawn around a horse and a vehicle, which means a tall ground floor with a wide opening at the street, living above, a stair placed wherever the original plan permitted, and no closets at all — because a stable does not need any. The volume is the asset and the plan is the constraint: storage becomes joinery that also does structural and spatial work, a wall of casework that divides the upper floor without a partition, a run beneath the sloped ceiling in what was the loft, and cabinetry at the ground floor that survives a floor which is still, effectively, a garage. The Pratt-area and Navy Yard conversions run to timber columns, exposed brick and irregular bays, and the answer there is a storage wall drawn to the column grid rather than a closet set into a corner. In both, the piece stands as furniture and loads the floor rather than the wall, which is the only sane approach when the wall behind is brick with a century of paint on it or plaster you would rather not open.

This is the honest place to say what a configured closet system does and does not do. Those systems are built on fixed increments and assume a wall that is plumb, level and square; in the postwar co-op buildings at the western edge of the neighborhood they do respectable work, and we say so. But in an 1878 mansion where the cornice is the reference line rather than the floor, or a rowhouse where a run loses half an inch across nine feet, or a carriage house where nothing is orthogonal to anything, the dimensions have to come off the measured room, which is why we draw and mill every piece to the house. Every project is designed in 3D, milled in our own workshop at 382 Canal Place in Mott Haven — a fifteen-minute run down the BQE on a decent morning — and dry-fit on the bench before it ships, which is what keeps an install measured in days rather than weeks. The crew that surveyed the house is the crew that sets it. We have never subcontracted a job, we have worked this way since 2008, and the cabinetry carries a twenty-five-year guarantee. Roughly half the district sits inside the Clinton Hill Historic District, so exterior work needs the Landmarks process; interior joinery does not, which is worth knowing before you assume a permit you do not need.

Cost follows the room rather than the address. A rebuilt bedroom reach-in starts around $3,500; a wardrobe wall along a party wall with a cabinet band above runs several times that; a full dressing room carved out of a back bedroom in one of the avenue houses reaches into the tens of thousands, and we publish how the pricing works rather than making you ask for it. For the blocks immediately west, the guide to Fort Greene covers the park-side Italianates in more detail, and the borough page for Brooklyn collects the rest. The first conversation is sixty minutes, at the house or at the workshop: $350 flat, credited to your project. Bring the floor plan if you have one — and tell us which woodwork you intend to keep.