In New York’s most bohemian neighbourhood, Greenwich Village, after climbing five floors up a historic staircase, we discovered a narrow apartment that, although it may not seem so at first glance, has been completely renovated.
The previous inhabitants of this home, an artist couple, had barely touched it since they bought it in the 1960s, and the walls were showing the passage of time, with paint splashes and peeling paint giving it a charmingly decadent air, ‘very old-world,’ explain the interior designers at BoND, the studio in charge of refurbishing it.
Maintaining the patina that made this apartment so special and restoring the original features were the main goals of the renovation, but reality eventually took over. Upon closer inspection, they discovered they were in terrible condition; some of the wooden beams had rotted away and the window frames were about to sag, so they had to replace everything.
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The goal had to shift slightly: ‘We wanted to create a space that retained the house’s character, but without it feeling fake or artificial,’ the studio explains.
They took advantage of the setback to open up the spaces, removing some walls and applying textured paint in a light grey colour palette to those that remained to make them look as if they had been there for years, an effect that is enhanced when northern light enters through the large skylight in the living room.
What they were able to preserve and restore was the wooden floor and some of the mouldings, which were sanded and stained to restore their splendour.
The apartment is less than 2.5 metres wide, so another goal of the renovation was to make the most of the available space. The main challenge when designing the new floorplan was finding a location for the bedroom and creating more storage space. The solution came in the form of an XXL wooden box, designed by the studio alongside the Lesser Miracle duo, who were commissioned to design it.
It contains the bedroom and a dressing area with plenty of storage options. The two rooms that have changed the most are the kitchen and the bathroom, where the studio introduced more modern materials but retained the calm, timeless style that prevails in the rest of the house and which BoND defines as ‘delicate and meditative.’ bond-ny.com
