Six hundred square feet, dressed like six thousand.
Below Houston the apartments are small, old and stubborn — tenement footprints and little lofts where storage is won by the inch and worn like tailoring.
The blocks from NoHo down through Nolita to the Lower East Side hold the city's most charismatic small apartments: 1900s tenements with railroad floor plans, walk-ups over restaurants, the occasional miniature loft with a skylight. Six hundred to nine hundred square feet, ceilings decent, walls brick or old plaster, closets either absent or the width of a violin case. Our smallest projects come from these blocks, and pound for pound they are the most satisfying work we do.
Small-apartment storage is vertical or it is nothing. A tenement's nine-foot ceiling gives a full meter above the door head on every wall — we band it with cabinets and suddenly the suitcase, the winter duvet and the stand mixer have addresses. Over-door storage, the transom's descendant, is the cheapest square footage in Manhattan and almost nobody builds it properly.
The railroad plan rewards thinking in walls rather than rooms. One long wall, treated as a continuous reach-in with sliding or bi-fold fronts, can carry a whole wardrobe past the kitchen without stealing the corridor. Where the plan pinches, fourteen-inch-deep cabinetry still earns its keep: shirts face forward like a haberdashery, knits stack, and only the suits demand the full twenty-four inches — so only one bay gets it.
Brick walls and hundred-year floors mean we level and scribe just as we do in the Village townhouses — casework standing on adjustable bases, fastened sparingly into brick with the respect a party wall deserves. Walk-up logistics shape the engineering itself: every piece is sized to turn a tenement stair, which is a constraint we design to on day one, not discover on install day.
Budgets here start at the bottom of our range — a single beautiful wall, not a whole-floor program — and the brief is usually one sentence long: make this apartment work like a bigger one. Vertical inches, honest materials, doors that close on everything. Six hundred square feet that dresses like six thousand.
If your stair is narrow and your ceiling is tall, you are our kind of project. Sketch the wall in the planner or come up to the Bronx and put your floor plan on our table.
Your neighborhood, your closet.
Sixty minutes at the Bronx workshop or in your apartment, no charge. Bring the floor plan if you have one.