The latest residential revamp project by Abruzzo Bodziak Architects (ABA), “Stick House, Brick Garden,” sits amid a pleasing architectural jumble in Greenpoint, a Brooklyn neighborhood developed in the late 19th century that initially attracted workers and their families, with its once-plentiful jobs on nearby docks, in shipbuilding, or in factories. The house’s tree-lined street, a few blocks from the East River, includes humble two-story wood-framed rowhouses, three- and four-story brick tenement buildings, and shiny new condos. The variety, says Emily Abruzzo, ABA cofounder, with Gerald Bodziak, “made it hard for us to know what to relate to,” referring to the design approach for the renovation and expansion. The firm, a 2016 Design Vanguard, which does a mix of civic and residential work, exhibitions, and research, prefers to riff on what already exists, explains Abruzzo, rather than invent forms entirely from scratch. “That has never been interesting to us,” she says.
ABA’s clients are Bettina and Fergus McCall, a British couple who both work in the TV and film industry (he in visual post-production and she in digital archiving and editing). They had bought their unassuming three-bedroom, 3½-bath, circa-1890 rowhouse in 2010, undertaking a few modest renovations and repairs before moving in, including updating an upstairs bathroom. But soon they began to consider a more comprehensive overhaul. The property, which like many others nearby consisted of two wood-framed floors over a masonry lower level, possessed notable assets, in particular an ample front yard and a capacious rear garden. But it also had serious deficiencies—it was dark, had little insulation behind its vinyl-siding-clad facades, and its front bedrooms, one each for their two then-teenage children, were cramped, with one much smaller than the other.
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