December 30, 2008
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WHEN Gavin Cutler bought an 1890s Brooklyn brownstone in 2004, he knew he wanted to gut the whole thing. He envisioned the top three floors as a big, open space for himself and his companion, Sundy Procter, and the garden floor as an apartment for his sister, Anne Cutler, and her 7-year-old daughter. Mr. Cutler hired Robert Young, a Manhattan architect, who had designed a loft for him in New York City and a weekend house in Montauk, to design the 4,000-square-foot space and to incorporate some of his very specific ideas.
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Light shines down from a skylight through an open staircase with glass landings and blue resin treads and from a double-height, floor-to-ceiling window wall in the rear. From anywhere in the house, the couple can glimpse parts of the floors above and below. Mr. Young said his clients wanted the house to be an open book, where each room was a separate chapter and led to the next. “When you have an open plan, everything has to relate to the next thing,” said Mr. Young, a partner at Murdock Young Architects.
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First, Mr. Young gently nixed the idea of rooms as floating white cubes. Even though he enlarged the 19-foot-wide house by extending the garden floor by 18 feet and each of the top three floors by 16 feet, there wasn’t the space for that vision.
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In came the white planes, sheets of white wallboard, suspended from the wood beams. These pseudowalls define the dining room, the sitting room opposite the kitchen and the second-floor television room. For the dining room, they used a piece on which Mr. Young and Mr. Cutler had collaborated for Mr. Cutler’s previous home — a black walnut table that seats 10. Ms. Procter found red Ultrasuede chairs at www.1stdibs.com (eight for $1,600), and she saw a hand-blown clear glass Venini chandelier, a splurge of around $10,000, at Lee’s Studio in Manhattan.
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A lipstick-red panel 8 feet wide soars 40 feet to the skylight, as if it were shooting through the glass landings. Opposite the red panel is Mr. Cutler’s cherished blue, in the form of translucent blue resin treads on a steel-framed staircase.
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Source : Murdock Young, The New York Times
Tags: lipstick red, murdock young, townhouse, townhouse interior, window wall, wood beam
Technorati Tags: lipstick red, murdock young, townhouse, townhouse interior, window wall, wood beam
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