Building
millwork for a
Westchester house.

A house in Westchester is a different project than an apartment in Manhattan, and not for the obvious reasons. The walls are mostly square. The ceilings, depending on the period, can be reasonable. What changes is the scope. In a city apartment a client asks for a primary closet and a kitchen pantry. In a Bronxville colonial they ask for a mudroom, a butler's pantry, two dressing rooms, a laundry, a library, and a garage cabinet, drawn on one set of plans, delivered as one schedule of work, and finished before the family returns from the summer.

We have been working a steady line of projects in lower and central Westchester for two years now, and the geography of the work has settled into a familiar arc. The largest single share of our deliveries goes to Bronxville and the streets that run east of Pondfield — the Tudors and the Georgian colonials that were drawn between the wars by architects who took the train down to Grand Central twice a week. South of Bronxville the work runs into Pelham Manor. North and east, we have a steady column in Scarsdale, particularly Heathcote and Fox Meadow, and a quieter run in Larchmont along the shore streets and Manor Park. Further out we deliver into Rye, Chappaqua, Bedford, and across the state line into Greenwich, Connecticut. Each town has its own architectural register and its own building rules, which we have learned the way one learns the back roads of a county — slowly, by going there.

The first thing that changes about a Westchester project is the drawing set. In the city we draw a room. In Westchester we draw a residence. The client almost always has a designer on the project, sometimes an architect, often both, and the millwork drawings have to read against the architect's plan, the interior designer's specifications, and the contractor's framing schedule, all at once. We produce a unified package: a cover sheet, an index, a key plan, and then a tab for each room — elevations at half-inch scale, sections at one-and-a-half, a hardware schedule, a finish schedule, and a coordinated schedule of switches, sconces, and HVAC vents that the trades downstream will have to honor. The drawing set for a whole-residence project runs eighty to a hundred and twenty sheets. It is the same shop drawing we would do for one room, repeated with discipline.

A full residence is also a different financial conversation. Our whole-residence projects start at about three hundred thousand dollars and run, on the larger Greenwich houses, well past the million-dollar mark when the library is panelled and the wine room is glazed in fluted glass. A primary dressing room alone, drawn for the kind of square footage a Bedford colonial gives you, will land between sixty and two hundred and eighty thousand depending on the run and the material. Most projects of any size take four to six weeks on the bench; a whole house, with installs staged room by room, will run a full season. We say this aloud in the first conversation because nothing else useful happens until both sides agree on what the work is.

The second thing that changes is the materials register. A city closet is often a single material — soap-finished oak, say, or a hand-rubbed lacquer over a poplar carcass — because the room is read alone. A Westchester house demands a palette. The mudroom wants a hard, washable material that will tolerate a wet labrador and a pair of muddy field boots; we usually draw it in white oak with a vegetable-tanned leather bench and a brass coat rail. The pantry takes the same white oak in a different cut, with a soap-finished interior and a stone or limestone counter. The library wants a darker register — walnut, sometimes oiled, sometimes finished with a low-sheen wax — because books live better against a darker wall. The primary dressing room is usually the softest of the registers: a pale oak with Belgian linen-panelled drawer fronts, brass hardware unlacquered, fluted glass on the upper cabinets. The palette has to read as a single house. Pulling it together, on one drawing set, is one of the more satisfying parts of the year.

The third thing that changes — and this is the part nobody warns you about — is the village. Bronxville, Scarsdale, Larchmont, Rye, Bedford: every one of these is a chartered village or a town with its own building department, its own certificate-of-occupancy regime, and its own delivery rules. Bronxville will not permit a panel truck on Pondfield between three and six. Scarsdale wants a dust-control plan if you're sanding inside the house. Larchmont enforces a noise window that begins at eight and ends at five. We have learned to call the village office before the install date, every time, and to keep a printed certificate of insurance in the cab. None of this is in the contract; all of it determines whether the install happens on the day it is scheduled to happen.

There is also the matter of getting the work there. The workshop is at the Bronx workshop, which is — for our Westchester clients — one of the practical advantages of choosing us. The Bronx is twenty minutes from Pelham and forty from Bedford on a good morning. We can stage a delivery for first light, get the crew through the village access window, and clear out before lunch. The truck never sits in Manhattan traffic. We have a standing arrangement with a smaller box truck for the houses where the driveway is too narrow for our regular fleet — particularly the older estates in Bedford and the back streets of Greenwich, where the original carriage drives were not drawn for a panel truck.

The last thing that changes is the relationship. A city closet ends when the install ends. A Westchester residence does not. We come back. We come back six months in to check the doors, a year in to re-tighten the brass, two years in when the wife has decided the library should have a ladder. We come back five years in when the children are taller and the playroom shelving has to change. The cabinetry has twenty-five years of guarantee on it and the joinery has lifetime; that is the contract, but the practice of it is that we treat a Westchester house as a long file rather than a closed one. By year three most of the families know our shop foreman by name, and most of the projects that arrive in any given quarter come from a referral from another house on the same street.

A Bronxville colonial we delivered last spring is the example we use in the workshop now. Six rooms, one drawing set, eleven weeks on the bench and four on site, white oak through the public spaces and walnut in the library, brass hardware unlacquered, Belgian linen on the dressing room drawer fronts, a pantry with a soap-finished interior and a slab of unfilled travertine on the island. The household is in it. The cabinets are doing the work they were drawn to do. Next year, when the daughter goes to college, we will come back and rework her room into a study. That is, in the end, what building millwork for a Westchester house means: not a project, but a long acquaintance with a building.