13 Leroy Street

13, Leroy Street, Manhattan, New York, NY, United States

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13 Leroy Street

13, Leroy Street, Manhattan, New York, NY, United States

Type

Residential › Private House

YEAR

2003

This building in Manhattan’s West Village, which had been a coal delivery garage in the 1920’s, had by the 90’s become a parking garage. When Wayne Turett was brought in, he began by studying the section, looking for opportunities to maximize usable outdoor space, bring natural light deep into the home, and create overlapping volumes of space where major programmatic elements would flow smoothly into each other. This required selectively demolishing most of the original building, lowering the ground floor, raising the second floor, and building a penthouse addition on the roof. A 3-story glass wall floods the house with light from the northeast. The heart of the house is the Main Room, at the back of the ground floor; it is a combination living room, dining room and kitchen, all under a massive structural skylight. A catwalk offers access to the upper reaches of the double-height space.
The newly adapted structure created three usable outdoor areas –each offering a different scale, texture, and sense of privacy. The first outdoor space is an unusual, small backyard on the ground floor where the ground is covered with river rocks and the back wall, is embellished with a large area of brightly colored plastic flowers. The skylit ceiling of the Main Room forms the 2nd floor rear outdoor space where one can walk out onto this fully landscaped deck, lit from below through the large structural skylight. A third deck is located on the roof and has a small garden accessible both from the main stairwell and from the Master Bath.

While the original interiors were entirely demolished, some elements of the old building were re-used in the new program. Stair treads were fashioned from the structure’s original timbers; exposed remnants of the historic brick party walls provide texture in the Main Room. The original brick façade is partially preserved, complimented by new steel, wood and “green screen” for promoting plant growth. On the whole, Turett has managed an impressive fusion: a home built nearly from scratch in the shell of an historic structure, filled with meticulous modern detail and offering every amenity, yet feeling old and settled, as though it had always been there.