Little Condominium Design: How to Maximize Area in a One-Bed Room with 3 People

hardwood floors, beamed ceilings, exposed brick walls, working fireplaces – for many disused New Yorkers, the ambiance of an old rowhouse is as delicious as a dessert buffet at a wedding.

But rowhouses also have their disadvantages. If you’re a couple working from home and planning a nation, the ever-shrinking width of those structures loses a bit of their allure. A hearth with a marble fireplace also becomes a hindrance if you really want extra vaulting.

Molly Gerber and Braden Pierce have been one such couple. They bought a duplex in 1930, a brick townhouse in Fortress Green, Brooklyn, with the goal of “having three” on the 1st, as Ms. Garber put it.

The 1,000-square-foot co-op was once owner-occupied, with a single bedroom and toilet upstairs and an all-purpose room with a shared toilet downstairs. The open-plan lower floor was once below grade, although instead of giving a dungeon vibe, it had windows on two exposures. It is also linked to a miniature, private box.

“We looked at apartments with similar layouts, upstairs and downstairs,” Ms. Garber recalled. “It was the first one in which the downstairs didn’t feel like a basement.”

The couple paid $1.25 million for the duplex in 2019 and settled into it for a few years, using it as a place of business during and after the pandemic. (Ms. Garber, now 39, works for a virtual advertising company focusing on the humanities; Mr. Pierce, 35, is a product supervisor for a residential Sun Finance company in South Carolina.) That’s when they had trouble seeing the food in the kitchen. Getting ready inside – the central part of the rowhouse is cloudy in most cases – he simply flipped a bright transfer.

Ms. Garber’s pregnancy approached and with it, the reminder that (with the exception of the toilet) only one room, on a high level, had an internal door. Through co-op laws, there may be negative alternate bedrooms within the condo. Hanging on a wall to create a peace haven for a child was once out of the question. The principles also prohibit complete remodeling of the toilet section of the ground floor.

Getting around those restrictions to satisfy his desires – did we mention he also loves to entertain? – Became a recreation of Tornado. Conveniently, he discovered Ryan Brooke Thomas, a fashion designer who knew the eight-unit development in detail because he lived on the management grounds. Renovations began in April 2023, an era before the birth of the couple’s daughter, Lillian. These were prepared in August at a cost of $230 per square understructure.

Ms. Thomas, who heads Kalos Eidos, a multidisciplinary design studio, described the unit she first encountered, along with six or seven other log finishes, as “great bones, but a lot of layers on top. “Was. She set out again to undress, unite, and squeeze potential from the disunited parts.

The task required running around a number of stubborn entities – a few windows, exposed brick, a fireplace with a white marble mantel, an interior staircase – and finding ways to connect the vault, which was predictably in short supply.

Ms. Thomas attacked disorder with customized oak millwork and a broad color palette to create functional divisions, or “zones.”

Upstairs, the order leads from Lillian’s room through a fresh, stone-topped island loosely lined with a banquette to an accessible kitchen, up to the living and dining wing that is opposite the stairs. Closets, cabinets and niches are transformed into an extended wardrobe of fresh cabinetry that lines a brick wall, connecting certain areas.

Below, an oak partition with available shelves separates the adult sound sleeping wing from the mixed home workplace and living room. Here a table is lined with a ribbon of customized wall gadgets. (Ms. Garber and Mr. Pierce move away from the table to the co-working area.)

Ms. Thomas recognized that during small residences, the dimensions and placement of furnishings had to be restrained enough to allow free, movable objects to move over the inevitable, stable feeling of the structure.

For example, the couple’s dining table and banquette are designed to fit exactly into an actual space at the end of the upper floor so that six people can easily seat and our bodies can easily move around the circumambulation area.

Oak furniture and surfaces harmonize both categories. The logs of the higher ground have been repurposed, and the lower ground have received new platforms for comparison. However, to keep the house from looking too oaky, Ms. Thomas specified a slate-blue accent color in the cabinetry, which is enriched through the herbal brick color behind it. The home’s variegated log scale was once painted a brilliant, synthetic white.

One of the two smaller rooms below was sacrificed for the development of a powder room. The fashion designer specified two agreeable fixtures (a bathroom and sink) and sage-green tile and cabinets.

The couple have no complaints about Lillian having access to the bathtub in the nursery. Mr. Pierce noted, “It’s a little annoying, but it’s much better than having to wash the baby all over the floor.”

She added, carrying a moist baby up and down on every date can be a harrowing experience.

Living Little is a biweekly column that explores what it takes to age more effectively, more sustainably, or more compactly.

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