Carnegie Hill Townhouse
An 1899 landmarked townhouse returned to a single family — five floors, one long conversation between then and now.
A century of subdivision had cut the house into apartments and painted its oak white. Working with preservation architects, we spent the first year undoing — lifting six layers of paint from the paneling, re-casting lost plaster profiles from a single surviving room, and returning the stair to its original run.
Then we allowed the house one secret per floor: a library lined in fumed oak where the parlour once stood, a bathing floor cut from a single lot of stone, a bedroom finished in the deepest brown paint New York would sell us. Nothing shouts. Landmarks approved every sheet of the drawing set on the first pass.
“Restoration is a conversation where the house speaks first, and for the first year, we only listened.”