The postwar tower, the convertible one-bedroom, and the room that works twice.

Murray Hill keeps the name of a farm, and Kips Bay the name of a bay that was filled in before the grid arrived. What sits on the two of them now is one of the least uniform stretches of Manhattan: a small district of nineteenth-century rowhouses and former carriage houses around the Morgan Library; a spine of walk-ups and modest prewar elevator buildings along Lexington and Third; and, from Second Avenue east to the river, a field of postwar and late-century towers holding more studios and convertible one-bedrooms per block than almost anywhere else on the island. Three kinds of wall, three different closet problems, inside a twenty-minute walk.

The rowhouse blocks between Madison and Third are the oldest of the three. Inside the Murray Hill Historic District, and in the landmarked run of former stables on East 36th Street known as Sniffen Court, the façades are protected and the interiors have been reworked so many times that no two rooms on a floor are quite alike. Expect wood lath under three coats of plaster, a chimney breast in the corner of a bedroom, a party wall that bows over its length, and door heads that were set by eye. We stand our casework as furniture on the floor rather than hang it on plaster, and we scribe to base and crown instead of cutting them. It is also the plain reason made-to-measure earns its keep in these rooms: a wall that loses half an inch over a nine-foot run turns a bank of stock panels into a row of tapering shadow gaps, which is why we draw and mill each piece to the room rather than order it to a catalogue dimension. The prewar joinery problem is at its most concentrated in buildings this small.

East of Second the geometry relaxes and the constraint changes. The postwar towers gave square rooms and drywall on studs, then hung a single wire shelf and rod at five feet and called it a closet. Here the spare dimension is overhead. We strip the builder package and build reach-ins floor to slab: double-hung rails to seven feet, drawers where a household actually keeps folded clothes, and a band of cabinets above for luggage and off-season wool. Nothing about that is exotic. It is simply the twenty inches the original fit-out left on the table.

The convertible one-bedroom is the neighborhood's signature plan, and it asks one room to sleep, dress and work. Three pieces of freestanding furniture will not do it; they crowd the floor and leave the walls empty. We draw the whole thing as a single elevation instead — a Murphy-bed wall with a counterbalanced mechanism and wardrobe flanks, or a study wall with a desk that stays loaded as it folds. Closed, there is no bed and no mechanism in view, only joinery, which is the point of building it rather than buying it. Where two lines have been combined and the plan gives up a room, that room becomes a dressing room with an island.

Kips Bay has its own buildings and its own clock. I. M. Pei's Kips Bay Plaza brought exposed-concrete frames and full-height glass to Second Avenue in the early sixties; Waterside Plaza went up a decade later on a platform over the river at 25th Street. Along First Avenue the households belong to the hospital corridor — Bellevue and NYU Langone — and they run on call schedules, which shapes a brief more than any question of style: everything visible at once, nothing stacked behind anything, drawer banks that open quietly at five in the morning. The buildings are mostly doorman co-ops and condos with alteration agreements, insurance riders and work-hour rules. Every piece is designed in 3D and milled in our own Bronx workshop at 382 Canal Place in Mott Haven, then dry-fit before it ships, so the install is measured in days rather than weeks — the difference between an approved alteration and a deferred one in an occupied building. The crew that measures the apartment is the crew that installs it; we have never subcontracted a job, and we have worked this way since 2008. The cabinetry carries a twenty-five-year guarantee.

Budgets follow the apartment rather than the address. A rebuilt bedroom reach-in begins around $3,500; a Murphy-bed wall with wardrobe flanks sits in the middle of the range; a dressing room in a combined line runs into the tens of thousands, and we publish how the pricing works rather than make you ask for it. The borough page for Manhattan and the guides on either side of this one cover the neighboring ground. The first conversation is sixty minutes, at the apartment or at the workshop: $350 flat, credited to your project. Bring the floor plan if you have one.