Daily Archives: April 18, 2010

Love This

Photo Credit: Design Sponge via photographer and designer jamie kovach.

This is a great way to cover up a dog crate. I love the concept and i think that Jack and I would do something a bit different. Wesley’s crate is in the kitchen and its a bit smaller than the one shown above. I was thinking a nice furniture addition could be a bar or book shelf of some sorts? We’ll see, but it would be really great to not have to look at a dog crate when you walk into the door.

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Filed under Apartment, Home, New York

Rowhouses

Photo Credit: Time out New York

If anyone is as big as a nerd as I am and is interested in learning more about NYC’s Rowhouses please see the attached New York City Rowhouse Manual.  You can print out the pages and carry them around with you as you try to guess the styles of Rowhouses that are scattered around the city.

Great neighborhoods to check out are: Greenwich Village, Lower Brooklyn (Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, Clinton Hill, Boreum Hill, Fort Greene etc.) the Upper East Side, and Chelsea.  The two photos below are taken of buildings in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood, gorgeous right?

Photo Credit: Lumierefi’s Flickr

My favorite streets on the Upper East Side are 92nd and 93rd between Lexington and Park Avenues. There a few 19th century wooden clapboard houses that still remain are some of the oldest int he district.  They just make me so happy when I see them. This sorry photograph was taken of one of the houses on my iphone. The 128 East 93rd street address built in 1866 looks to be a combination of the Italianate and Second Empire Styles.

In Greenwich Village you can find one of my favorite houses in the city.  The “Weathermen Townhouse” or Langworthy Residence located at 18 West 11th Street, designed by Hardy Holzman Pffiefer Architects in 1972, even though it was erected pretty recently (1970s), it has a bit of history in its design that makes this building a popular tourist stop within the historic district.  This house was originally built in 1845, alongside three other townhouses on the block that were built by Henry Brevoort Jr.

No photo credit unfortunately, this is photo I took of a photo at the architecture center in soho.

This building is a great example of contemporary design that keeps the integrity of the historic context.  The New York Observer wrote a story on this building, “On first glance, all of the five-story townhouses lining West 11th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues blend together, lending the block the same charming and unaffordable air of any other Greenwich Village.”  The article continues to describe the sharp architectural differences that this building has as its first and second floor windows sharply jut out past the other facades of the neighboring buildings,  “The starkly modern building begs to be recognized, for its incongruity and its history,” which makes the design decisions of Hardy Holzman Pffiefer so well conceived.  This building’s reconstruction was due to being accidentally detonated when five members of the radical Weathermen group used it as a makeshift bomb factory.

One can see the intentions of the architect, because upon viewing, there is a feeling of an explosion.  The design is further enhanced as the architect preserved the historic character of the block, by keeping the original sightline, ground line, materials and stoop style in tact.  The scale is completely in keeping with the other buildings on the block as it holds the same amount of stories and bays as its neighboring buildings.  The new features are different enough from the historical ones in the other buildings that it keeps the integrity of the property and its environment

photo credit: wired new york

The last thing I would like note is there is this beautifully inspiring blog called A Brooklyn Limestone I have no idea what this woman does for a living, because their home is beautiful, they’ve done a great amount of renovating within the past two years (using all high end materials and appliances) and they’re always traveling to exotic and exuberant places and all of her photographs are beautiful.  Its pretty intriguing.  I absolutely love her kitchen.

photo credit: Mrs. Limestone


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Filed under Apartment, Home, New York, Travel Tours