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The present owner of this house in New York City’s West Village found it in a pretty sorry state for use as a residence. The building began life as a five-story tenement in the 1890s, and served as low-rent housing for 50 years or so. But window tax laws in the 1930s and 1940s made many five story buildings uneconomical, so the landlord tore down the top three floors, storing the rubble, apparently, in the basement. When the current owner came across it in the 1990s, the building had been most recently used as an automotive shop.

Yet somehow, he looked at this dilapidated shell and he saw the light. Literally.

"The house is all about unexpected light," said Robert Evans, AIA, of Evans Heintges Architects, who designed the building’s renovation into a house. By the time the owner contacted Evans Heintges, he had become very familiar with the site, and had come up with a detailed program for the house. But the number one requirement was light. Lots of light.

"We had an owner who was absolutely adamant about maximizing daylight," Evans said. "He would ask: ‘How deep is the wall? How big are the windows? What’s the nature of the shadows?" And the client was very specific. "We would have conversations," Evans said, "where the owner would say, "If I’m sitting in my chair in the living room on December 21st, am I going to get any natural light?" And we would do a whole series of computer models to show him—from the winter solstice to the summer solstice—how you would perceive light in the living spaces."

Evans said that figuring out the natural lighting for the building was one of the most interesting parts of working on the project. The building is 80 feet deep, but the architects found ways to get natural light into almost every corner. In one spot, Evans said, "you get a vertical shaft of space with a skylight and windows that look out onto the sky and trees—which is very unusual in the middle of a block in the middle of Manhattan."

Evans Heintges worked with the owner in an unusual but felicitous arrangement. The owner worked with Tim Seggerman of Inca Building Workshop, who served as the project’s builder and interior designer, but also as the owner’s representative. Seggerman shared a design vision with Evans Heintges, which made the process work very smoothly. The concept for the building was to work out the architecture in advance, but for Seggerman to work out the interior details as the structure went up.

"In the later aspects of the process," Evans said, "the project really became an interior renovation."

Once the design was approved by the Landmarks Commission, however, very little about the actual architecture changed during construction.

"The owner came to us at the first meeting with a fairly extensive book," Evans said. "It was almost a little novella that he had written about what’s important to him and how he proceeds through the day. The kind of spaces that he lived in, the kind of spaces that he worked in, thoughts on his travel and images from Morocco and Sicily and all over the world."

The owner works as a music and media entrepreneur and executive, and his programmatic requirements reflect his love of music. "In terms of his making music, he always wanted a studio in the cellar," Evans said. "There’s no way any of the next door neighbors or anyone out on the street could ever hear him; he could blast away at four in the morning. And then on the top floor, he wanted a penthouse, a very contemplative space where he could create music, and now actually his computer is up there. He can just be sitting there looking at the Empire State Building and the trees in the back yard, and sending MP3s over to Sweden at the same time. So there were specific spaces he wanted."

And while solving the client’s program—and getting him his light—was the first priority in designing the house, Evans takes satisfaction in what his team accomplished. "With every project I do," he said, "there’s always something I’ll look at and say, ‘Oh gosh, if only this had happened, if only I had stomped my feet and gotten this….’ But I really don’t feel that way about this project."

Kevin Lerner

Gross square footage:
11,000 sq ft

Total construction cost:
$2,000,000 (excluding fixtures and furnishings)

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