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The historic building (1) has been fitted out with a new lobby (2), offices (top of page, 3, and 4), shared desks (5), and a boardroom (6). Photos © Frank Oudeman, click to enlarge.

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“We wanted the students, who have been in a classroom environment all day, to have a space that feels warm, inviting, inspiring, and social, but still quiet enough to be productive,” says Francine Alagappan, who served as client rep and as a consultant for the renovation. “We encourage them to treat this place as an extension of their own home—to come early and settle in, or to stay a bit longer and hang out.”

The four-story redbrick building, with its crowstepped gable and a sampling of straightforward Gothic flourishes, indeed confers a certain academic charm without being too imposing. The schoolhouse, originally built in 1891, was one of about a dozen designed by Vaux & Radford for the Children’s Aid Soci­ety, an organization founded in the 1850s that still provides social services for the city’s poor and homeless children. (Calvert Vaux is perhaps best known for collaborating with Frederick Law Olmsted on Manhattan’s Central Park and for designing many of the urban oasis’s architectural features). And, with the support of two benefactresses—sisters Serena and Julia Rhinelander—this particular outpost became the Rhinelander Industrial School, which taught vocational skills.

But present-day looks are deceiving. After the building was sold in the 1950s, the fanciful brickwork, in dire need of repointing, was parged with stucco instead. A bustle to the east, fronted with a large ornamental cartouche, was razed in the late 1980s to make way for a condominium on an adjacent parcel. As the building traded owners, the interiors were repeatedly chopped up and reorganized. By the time Advantage purchased it in 2016, the term fixer-upper may have been something of an understatement.

Refreshing the structure’s exterior, and reconfiguring the inside to make the most of a relatively small footprint, fell to In Studio founder Martin Finio. It was the transformation by his former firm, Christoff:Finio, of a narrow five-story townhouse as the headquarters for the Heckscher Foundation that convinced Advantage stakeholders to hire the firm. “When I walked into that space, the footprint felt bigger than it probably was on paper,” says Alagappan. “If that could be achieved there, it would be pretty amazing what we could accomplish at the scale of our building.” And, with a portfolio of residential projects, Finio had the know-how to introduce domestically scaled elements to the 18,740-square-foot structure and maintain an intimate ambience.

Although Finio wished to restore the exterior brickwork, as he explains, forensic probing revealed that removing the stucco would have taken the brick face with it. “It was just that much beyond repair.” Today, the exterior has been scored and resealed to roughly emulate brownstone. An added stoop (the original entrance was off to the side) was refinished to finesse the entry sequence and allow guests to walk by an original facade panel emblazoned with a large sculptural R (for Rhinelander). The lobby—“somewhere between an apartment and a collegiate library” in feeling, says Finio—welcomes students and serves as a place, Alagappan points out, where parents can comfortably send a few e-mails while waiting to pick up their kids.

The removal of a 2-foot-thick load-bearing brick wall near the center of the building (while steel framing was simultaneously erected) helped to free the floor plan, and excavation beneath the building created another usable level. Two staircases, which double as emergency egress, create a circuit throughout the building. The more public one corkscrews up around a lenticular wall, jacketed in slick, oil-rubbed bronze panels. The second stairwell, more tucked away, takes a different tack, with guardrails comprising tricolored metal sheets, cut like Indian jali.

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Both stairs feature custom metalwork (7 & 8). Photos © Frank Oudeman

Each floor is lined with offices (most assigned to senior tutors; others can be reserved on an as-needed basis) for one-on-one instruction, but there are also a handful of small classrooms and conference rooms for group and practice-exam sessions. Shared tables and furnishings dot the plan, serving as impromptu meetup locations. On the second floor, a bright cafeteria and lounge, created by enclosing a rear terrace with a minimal curtain wall, adds to the tutoring center’s more residential scale. With banquette seating and an island, it’s akin to a large, shared kitchen. Here, underfoot, limestone tiles take the shape of a tessellated pentagonal pattern often seen in Mughal architecture—again playing up the client’s interest in geometry.

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The architects enclosed a rear terrace (9) to create a cafeteria and lounge (10). Photos © Frank Oudeman

But the crown jewel is the top floor, where much of the ceiling, lined with walnut planks, crests and dips in tandem with the schoolhouse’s many peaks and gables. Offices feature one-off architectural elements—an eyelid dormer in one, a turret in another—with pleasant views of the slated roof and chimneys of the Church of the Holy Trinity next door. There is also a new boardroom for Advantage’s philanthropic arm, a foundation that offers pro bono instruction to high schoolers from underserved and underrepresented backgrounds, who are also welcome to use the tutoring center.

With college acceptance rates as low as ever, students today face immense pressure to hit the books after hours and hone their competitive edge. Although many, perhaps out of habit or convenience, have come to prefer remote or hybrid supplemental instruction, “We’ve observed that in-person sessions bring out a unique energy and rhythm that can be difficult to replicate,” says founder (and Alagappan’s husband) Arun Alagappan. “The tutoring center feels like a lounge and a community hub for them as much as a workplace for us—which is exactly what we hoped it would be.”

Click plan to enlarge