No two walls agree in the Village. Good thing we measure.
An 1847 rowhouse has settled for 178 years and intends to keep going. Storage that survives it is scribed, not squared.
West of Sixth Avenue the street grid gives up, and so does the right angle. The Village's 1840s–1880s rowhouses have settled into themselves: floors that fall an inch and a half across a room, walls that rack out of plumb, door heads that haven't been level since Lincoln. Flat-pack storage dies here — the gaps tell on it immediately. Everything we install in the Village is scribed to the actual room, which is why we laser-survey before we draw a line.
The townhouse program is vertical. Bedrooms on three and four take dressing rooms under sloped dormers — we treat the rafter line as the cabinet's crown and gain hanging where a catalog system would leave a triangle of dead air. The parlor floor wants concealment: storage that reads as paneled wainscot and shutters, because a landmarked parlor with visible "systems" is a small heartbreak. Under the stoop stairs, the classic Village coat-and-stroller problem gets a bank of drawers shaped to the stringer.
Landmarks govern the exterior, not your closets — but the spirit matters inside too. Our Village clients almost always choose painted finishes from the historic register, panel profiles taken from the house's surviving doors, and unlacquered hardware that will age at the house's own speed. The work should look discovered, not delivered.
Width is honest in the Village: most rowhouses run 18 to 25 feet, party wall to party wall. We get aggressive about depth instead — fourteen-inch reach-ins where a hallway can spare them, wardrobe walls on the bedroom's quiet side, a Murphy bed in the garden-floor study so the house sleeps five on Thanksgiving and works the other fifty-one weeks.
The mechanics of the build respect the house: no demolition of historic fabric, casework standing on leveled bases that absorb the floor's fall, scribes cut by hand on install day to follow plaster that curves like a coastline. The same maker who milled the run in the Bronx cuts those scribes — which is the whole argument for not subcontracting.
Our West Village projects begin with a visit and a survey, and the survey is the product as much as the millwork: once a house this old is mapped, every future decision gets easier. Sixty minutes, no charge, and we have yet to meet a Village floor that scared us.
Your neighborhood, your closet.
Sixty minutes at the Bronx workshop or in your apartment, no charge. Bring the floor plan if you have one.