When a young Manhattan couple learned they were expecting their first child, they set their sights on Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood to settle in. They commissioned local firm STUDIOSC to combine two adjacent units—one a duplex—in a condominium near the East River. Merging the apartments allowed the architects to create “wings”: a private family zone on the top level and a public-facing one, anchored by the kitchen and living area, on the bottom.
To achieve this programmatically, the architects removed the existing kitchen in the standard unit, transforming it into a den, and then gutted the duplex’s lower-level kitchen to “craft something more solid,” says firm principal Stephen Conte. “The goal was to create a very minimal but warm environment that would also be a little contextual, given the space’s double-height window with views to the river.” Conte says that the biggest challenge of executing this vision was smoothing out the numerous bumps and soffits that scarred the walls and ceilings to create a clean canvas: “The push and pull of leveling out the surfaces—sometimes inches, sometimes feet—really drove a lot of our thinking and strategy.”
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