East Village Apartment | GRT Architects

GRT Architects renovated an apartment in a storied East Village building known as Onyx Court. The six-story corner structure was designed by Harde & Short best known for landmarked structures like The Alwyn, a terracotta masterpiece with a playful tromp l’oeil courtyard. When Onyx Court was completed in 1902, Second Avenue was a thriving district of theater and arts, sometimes nicknamed The Yiddish Rialto. The building was long home to émigré opera singers, Oscar winning composers and others before being turned into a co-op in 1983. Our renovation completely rethought the apartment’s layout while preserving its turn of the century disposition. The space is neither more open nor closed than when we found it We created a new collection of rooms, organized by a corridor, demarcated by decorative parquet, with sightlines, adjacencies and program tailored to our clients’ lifestyle. At the entrance we straightened a previously cricked corridor to offer a view thru an east-facing window from the front door. To create and frame this sightline we added a shallow arched opening in a bearing brick wall, the only structural change called for in our design. The journey down this corridor celebrates the building’s irregularity with asymmetrical niches and rounded openings in thick plaster walls. The corridor delivers you to the kitchen, which we relocated diagonally across the apartment. The kitchen previously made do with the least desirable windows and did not communicate with other spaces, per nineteenth century custom. We reversed this but took care to recreate three discrete rooms – kitchen, living, dining – each with their own mood. We used functional elements to create a semi-open kitchen. A low cabinet on brass legs provides modesty to the entry corridor while a suspended storage system demises the kitchen from the dining room. We mixed simple materials in varied textures and colors to create a playful and functional kitchen. A satin white counter helps blur the line between cooking and living spaces, playing nice with adjacent walls. Cabinetry, including custom oversized pulls, was made locally from white oak. All hard surfaces are two-inch mosaic, a nod to the exuberant original tilework that graces the building’s public spaces. A sculptural island is home to all-electric appliances and creates an abstract backdrop to the dining table. A linear brass pendant and decorative parquet further imply the dining room, while a gently curved plaster cove brings the spaces together. The living room is demised by a herringbone threshold in a framed opening and reinforced with a new material palette. We organized this space around a full wall of built-in shelves which includes a sliding panel that conceals a television. A series of complementary colors emphasize the relief of this composition while oak pulls tie it back to the kitchen. The largest such pull is mounted to a sheet of textured glass which allows east light to reach a small office without compromising privacy. We created a principal suite where the kitchen was formerly located. We revised the corridor to create a sense of privacy between the sleeping area and the bathroom to make as gracious a sequence as possible between spaces. Custom built-in closets were installed throughout, including one in the footprint of an inoperative dumbwaiter. The adjacent bathroom expands on ideas from the kitchen, mixing textures and scales of hard surfaces with soft forms in oak. A small guest room doubles as a second office when its murphy bed is tucked away, as it is in our photos. We were able to add a powder room – no small feat as anyone who has been on the receiving end of the phrase wet over dry will tell you. We found space for this small room by greatly reducing circulation space without compromising privacy. Our work also included infrastructural upgrades such as replacing all windows brick-to-brick, allowing for larger daylight openings. We also oversaw the addition of high efficiency air conditioning whose ductwork we carefully integrated so as not to break the mood. We engaged engineers to help us support equipment on the roof and oversee building-wide upgrades to electrical service.

Architecture Firm: GRT Architects

Website: https://www.grtarchitects.com/

IG: https://www.instagram.com/grtarchitects/

Lead Architects: Tal Schori + Rus Mehta

Photography: Nicole Frnazen

Website: https://www.nicolefranzen.com/

IG: https://www.instagram.com/nicole_franzen/