Each of the five boroughs contains a constellation of neighborhoods with their own cultural quirks and pervading personalities. In Cobble Hill, ethnically diverse mom-and-pop shops and traditional brownstones entwine with a boho art scene, yielding an old-school yet forward-thinking Brooklyn vibe. It’s here that Workshop/APD founding principal Andrew Kotchen was given the opportunity to nestle a unique piece of architecture between two 1900s town houses, at once putting into relief the district’s dual natures.
“It’s rare to get the chance to run an intelligent design process that isn’t based in historical preservation,” Kotchen says of the ground-up plan he conceived for his client, a married couple with two teenage children. After performing initial zoning studies, he and the WAPD team demolished the existing residence and inserted a modernist glass-and-steel town house, encompassing 7,000 square feet and four bedrooms across six floors. “We didn’t set out to take up every inch of buildable square footage,” Kotchen continues. “The focus was on creating comfortable, livable rooms.” Leveraging ideas from past projects with this client, he has devised, in its “calming simplicity,” an exemplar of the contemporary urban home.
The streamlined program begins with a triple-height entry atrium that references elements from the facade. A screen of ebonized-oak slats rises the full 31 feet and then crosses the ceiling, the orientations nodding to the exterior’s vertical windows and horizontal Belgian bricks, which extend into the entry. Furthermore, the slat color links to the blackened steel framing those windows. It
