The white-brick co-op, the square room, and the tower on Second Avenue.

Yorkville is the part of the Upper East Side that never quite went grand. East of Lexington and north of 79th, the old German and Hungarian neighborhood left behind narrow walk-ups and railroad flats; the postwar decades filled the avenues with white- and beige-brick co-ops; and the Second Avenue subway, when it finally opened its first stations in 2017, pulled a row of glass towers up along its route. Three New Yorks in a dozen blocks, and three ideas of where a household is meant to keep its clothes — none of them generous.

The white-brick building is the neighborhood's signature and its central closet problem. Thrown up quickly in the 1950s and '60s, these co-ops gave efficient square rooms, eight-foot ceilings, and a single shallow reach-in per bedroom with a shelf-and-rod hung at a builder's five feet. The floor plan is sound; the storage was an afterthought. The spare dimension in a room like this is up, so we strip the developer closet and run reach-in systems floor to ceiling — double-hung rails within easy reach, a band of cabinets to the slab above for luggage and off-season coats. In the convertible one-beds these buildings are full of, the closet and a small desk often resolve into one wall.

The older Germantown stock asks the opposite kind of patience. The walk-ups and the occasional brownstone east toward Henderson Place were built without real closets at all, their plaster-on-lath walls long since bowed and settled. A room that runs a half-inch out of square over eight feet is exactly where a configured closet kit fails — a bank of stock panels turns into a run of tapering gaps — which is why we draw and mill every piece to the room rather than order it to a catalog dimension. The same care we bring to any prewar apartment applies here: casework scribed to the wall, the trim left uncut.

The new towers along Second Avenue pose the tower question in its purest form. The plans are efficient and the rooms are square, the closets exist on paper, and they were fitted in an afternoon with wire shelving under a nine-foot ceiling. Here there is room to be more ambitious — primary bedrooms that take a proper dressing room or a full fitted wardrobe wall, drawn off the door heads so the millwork reads as part of the architecture rather than something added after the closing.

Geography is on Yorkville's side. Our workshop is in the Bronx, at 382 Canal Place in Mott Haven, a straight run down from the neighborhood — so the designer who measures your co-op bedroom or your tower closet works down the hall from the bench that mills it. Every piece is drawn in 3D, cut in-house, dry-fit before it ships, and installed by our own crew, never subcontracted. We have worked this way since 2008, and the cabinetry carries a twenty-five-year guarantee.

Budgets run the range these three kinds of home imply: a single white-brick reach-in begins around $3,500, and a full dressing room in one of the new towers reaches into the tens of thousands — we publish how the pricing works, and the wider view of the borough lives on our Manhattan page. The first conversation is sixty minutes, at the apartment or at the workshop, no charge. Bring the floor plan, or just the ceiling height.