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Front of the house with the garage door open and closed.

into the building and show entry, and the owners have some infill pieces—some made of wood, some of steel—to support the
other red items that fit right in. So color is used as an accent, level floor. Then we had to make that look good from the lower
with the main palette as black and white.” level. The taller ones are very visible, so they’re painted white.
With its white walls, off-black steel beams, and blue As they get smaller, we started painting them black as [faux]
and red elements, the main living area brings to mind a shadow lines. It looks great now, but it took quite a process of
Mondrian painting or the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht, study and thought to get there.”
Netherlands, both of which exemplify the early 20th-century Site drainage from the new roof and rear patio posed
De Stijl movement in Dutch art and design. The use of the word another issue. “The building is landlocked, with 100% lot
Haus (German for “house”) in the project’s name reinforces such occupancy, so we had to drain all water to the front—the alley
associations, since the De Stijl movement heavily influenced end—while the roof slopes to the rear,” Bloomberg said. In
Germany’s Bauhaus design school. addition, “the owners wanted to be prepared for all of the crazy
As completed, the residence’s interior looks quite simple, flooding and heavy rains that are now quite common. So we ran
but that doesn’t mean it was easy to conceive or execute. several drain lines from that patio area in back to the front alley,
“Simplicity is always the hardest thing to achieve,” Bloomberg including in the basement ceiling and in the garage ceiling.
said. “Although the space is simple in plan, it’s actually quite It was a huge puzzle to get around and through all the steel
complex in section and three dimensions, with overlap of spaces, structure without it being evident, but we did it.”
views, and natural light coming from several sources. So it Obtaining the required zoning variance and approval from
feels very lively when you are there. And because you can view the Historic Preservation Review Board took more than a year,
into the garage, there’s a complexity to that spatial overlap—it and carrying out the construction work in the tight confines of
always feels like there’s more beyond.” Naylor Court wasn’t easy.
To keep the interior design clean, KUBE concealed the “Bringing infrastructure to an alley property is
pantry, a storage space, and the powder room behind the challenging,” Bloomberg said. For this project, “the water, gas,
kitchen, used a concealed hydronic radiant system in the floors and electric [services] all had to be upgraded, and that took a
for all the heating, and used a high-velocity air-conditioning great deal of time, money, and effort. The alley had to be dug
system consisting of small tubes that can run through walls, up, which wasn’t popular with other residents. This issue is
rather than a more-conventional system requiring large ducts. sometimes preventing alley properties from being developed
Another design challenge involved the building’s party into residences, as it can be just too expensive to bring sufficient
walls, one of which wasn’t strong enough to support the new infrastructure to these sites.”
second floor. As a consequence, “we had to insert steel columns Naylor Court and the city’s other alleys “used to house
above and below the existing beams to support that entire mainly back-of-house buildings such as garages and carriage
side of the house, rather than relying on the brick party wall,” houses, and now we are realizing they can be repurposed as
Bloomberg said. “It was like surgery.” The building’s existing residences that allow for living in a new way,” Bloomberg said.
steel beams, she added, “step down gradually in elevation, as “I love the fact that this was always a garage, and it’s still a
they used to carry a sloped roof. Since they’re now holding the garage—we’ve just incorporated a residence, too. I think that’s a
new second floor, which is level, we had to develop a system of great use of the building.”

28 PARKING/SPACE