Brooklyn by Way of ‘Twin Peaks’
A remodeling experiment designed with David Lynch in mind.
THE architects were lost.
They said they had arrived at 20 Chester Street in Brooklyn, only to find a juvenile detention complex, across the street from vacant and deteriorated buildings. They called for directions, and the woman who is selling the house at 20 Chester Avenue gave them a landmark: Green-Wood Cemetery, only half a block away.
Sheila McCarthy, the real estate agent for the sale, suggested that “for those who like celebrities, Rudolph Valentino is buried there.” The 4,000-square-foot red-brick house is priced at $1.15 million.
So a surreal wind was already blowing down the avenue when the architects — Bartholomew Voorsanger, Martin Stigsgaard and Peter Miller of Voorsanger Architects — finally pulled to a stop on what the listing sheet described as a “lovely tree-lined street” only a few blocks from the F train’s Church Avenue stop.
They had come to redesign, at least on paper, the solid 1924 house, attached like a Siamese twin to its next-door neighbor — and, in the process, to imagine a client and remake the house to suit him or her.
The first thing that struck Mr. Voorsanger, a modernist who redesigned the Asia Society museum and headquarters in Manhattan, along with a luminously transparent house in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Charlottesville, Va., was the private driveway next to the house: a long and wide alley, enclosed by ornate iron gates and leading to a backyard garage.
“Who wants to drive in 70 feet to park a car?” he said. “Let’s do something fantastic with this space.”
Standing in the small weed-covered garden alongside the garage, he began to imagine the client: “a photographer who wants to turn it into a studio, a photographer interested in a sort of demimonde — he wants the spirit of this neighborhood, the freedom to craft exactly the house he wants.”
Expounding while his associates measured, Mr. Voorsanger envisioned the driveway, “the whole lineal piece, as a stage set.”
“This is a guy who has rock stars for friends,” he said.
As cool as the client is, he isn’t rich yet, Mr. Voorsanger dreamed on: “He might rent out the second floor as a dormitory, the new kind of New York City rental, you know, on the Japanese model.”
A week later, the architects had clearly let their imaginations run riot, transmogrifying a simple but large (20 rooms) house in Brooklyn into a remodeling experiment designed with David Lynch in mind.
Mr. Lynch, who made the movie “Blue Velvet” and the television series “Twin Peaks,” has a strange sensibility — and so has the client.
“We’ve never seen this guy,” Mr. Voorsanger said, speaking of the imaginary client as if he were real — and elusive. “He refuses to see us. He just writes us letters and communicates through e-mails. He said he was enormously moved by Cormac McCarthy’s new book, ‘The Road,’ in which everything is black. Chip Kidd did the cover.”
The way the architects tell it, they suggested to the client that he turn the driveway into a garden.
“But he would only approve it if it were ‘a landscape of no hope,’ ” Mr. Voorsanger said, while his colleagues — now including Peggy Loar — nodded.
So the architects created a garden of enormous black granite boulders — “he rejected volcanic rock,” Mr. Voorsanger said — watched over by a black Neapolitan mastiff. A handsome skylight, made of glass and steel struts, spans the entire length of the old driveway.
The ornate iron gate has been redesigned into solid black steel doors that appear to be slightly open — a ray of light shows through — but are too narrow to actually enter and do not swing open.
Instead, the visitor (and one wonders how many the client might have) enters by a regular front door — the left door of a pair. Visitors pass through an entry hall and then out to the landscaped garden of boulders and back to what was the garage, which has been replaced by bleacher seating for a theater.
The back of the first floor has been cut away to reveal a stage and, peeking around the stage, a conventional, vaguely Chippendale dining room set. Upstairs is the client’s one bedroom.
As they laid out the elaborate renderings, the architects kept glancing toward a huge shiny poster-size print of the almost ethereal rock-strewn former driveway, which hung behind them on Mr. Voorsanger’s office wall. They then produced two almost identical renderings of this landscape. One had a short bald man peering out from behind one of the boulders.
The owner?
The architects shrugged. “We don’t know how that man got onto that drawing,” Mr. Voorsanger said.
The team said their first thought was to completely redo the front of the house, but they soon thought better of it. They didn’t think the neighbors would appreciate such a drastic change.
Instead, they have redesigned only the front gate and the front door, exaggerating its cruciform design and recessing the two doors — changing them from white to black.
On the second floor, two rental apartments have been imagined, with no change to the front of the house but with two enormous skylights wrapping from the roof down the driveway side.
“The neighbors were wary of the new design at first,” Mr. Voorsanger said, now leaping to the imagined completion of the project. “But then the client invited them all to a theater evening. They didn’t applaud at the end, and they left shaking their heads, but they were ultimately impressed by what they had seen, and they came to appreciate his creative value. So in the end, peace reigned in the neighborhood.”
A footnote: The architects learned that Rudolph Valentino is not actually buried in Green-Wood Cemetery. “Maybe he was going to be, but he ended up being buried in Hollywood,” Mr. Stigsgaard said.
Even more surreal.
***
THE architects were lost.
They said they had arrived at 20 Chester Street in Brooklyn, only to find a juvenile detention complex, across the street from vacant and deteriorated buildings. They called for directions, and the woman who is selling the house at 20 Chester Avenue gave them a landmark: Green-Wood Cemetery, only half a block away.
Sheila McCarthy, the real estate agent for the sale, suggested that “for those who like celebrities, Rudolph Valentino is buried there.” The 4,000-square-foot red-brick house is priced at $1.15 million.
So a surreal wind was already blowing down the avenue when the architects — Bartholomew Voorsanger, Martin Stigsgaard and Peter Miller of Voorsanger Architects — finally pulled to a stop on what the listing sheet described as a “lovely tree-lined street” only a few blocks from the F train’s Church Avenue stop.
They had come to redesign, at least on paper, the solid 1924 house, attached like a Siamese twin to its next-door neighbor — and, in the process, to imagine a client and remake the house to suit him or her.
The first thing that struck Mr. Voorsanger, a modernist who redesigned the Asia Society museum and headquarters in Manhattan, along with a luminously transparent house in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Charlottesville, Va., was the private driveway next to the house: a long and wide alley, enclosed by ornate iron gates and leading to a backyard garage.
“Who wants to drive in 70 feet to park a car?” he said. “Let’s do something fantastic with this space.”
Standing in the small weed-covered garden alongside the garage, he began to imagine the client: “a photographer who wants to turn it into a studio, a photographer interested in a sort of demimonde — he wants the spirit of this neighborhood, the freedom to craft exactly the house he wants.”
Expounding while his associates measured, Mr. Voorsanger envisioned the driveway, “the whole lineal piece, as a stage set.”
“This is a guy who has rock stars for friends,” he said.
As cool as the client is, he isn’t rich yet, Mr. Voorsanger dreamed on: “He might rent out the second floor as a dormitory, the new kind of New York City rental, you know, on the Japanese model.”
A week later, the architects had clearly let their imaginations run riot, transmogrifying a simple but large (20 rooms) house in Brooklyn into a remodeling experiment designed with David Lynch in mind.
Mr. Lynch, who made the movie “Blue Velvet” and the television series “Twin Peaks,” has a strange sensibility — and so has the client.
“We’ve never seen this guy,” Mr. Voorsanger said, speaking of the imaginary client as if he were real — and elusive. “He refuses to see us. He just writes us letters and communicates through e-mails. He said he was enormously moved by Cormac McCarthy’s new book, ‘The Road,’ in which everything is black. Chip Kidd did the cover.”
The way the architects tell it, they suggested to the client that he turn the driveway into a garden.
“But he would only approve it if it were ‘a landscape of no hope,’ ” Mr. Voorsanger said, while his colleagues — now including Peggy Loar — nodded.
So the architects created a garden of enormous black granite boulders — “he rejected volcanic rock,” Mr. Voorsanger said — watched over by a black Neapolitan mastiff. A handsome skylight, made of glass and steel struts, spans the entire length of the old driveway.
The ornate iron gate has been redesigned into solid black steel doors that appear to be slightly open — a ray of light shows through — but are too narrow to actually enter and do not swing open.
Instead, the visitor (and one wonders how many the client might have) enters by a regular front door — the left door of a pair. Visitors pass through an entry hall and then out to the landscaped garden of boulders and back to what was the garage, which has been replaced by bleacher seating for a theater.
The back of the first floor has been cut away to reveal a stage and, peeking around the stage, a conventional, vaguely Chippendale dining room set. Upstairs is the client’s one bedroom.
As they laid out the elaborate renderings, the architects kept glancing toward a huge shiny poster-size print of the almost ethereal rock-strewn former driveway, which hung behind them on Mr. Voorsanger’s office wall. They then produced two almost identical renderings of this landscape. One had a short bald man peering out from behind one of the boulders.
The owner?
The architects shrugged. “We don’t know how that man got onto that drawing,” Mr. Voorsanger said.
The team said their first thought was to completely redo the front of the house, but they soon thought better of it. They didn’t think the neighbors would appreciate such a drastic change.
Instead, they have redesigned only the front gate and the front door, exaggerating its cruciform design and recessing the two doors — changing them from white to black.
On the second floor, two rental apartments have been imagined, with no change to the front of the house but with two enormous skylights wrapping from the roof down the driveway side.
“The neighbors were wary of the new design at first,” Mr. Voorsanger said, now leaping to the imagined completion of the project. “But then the client invited them all to a theater evening. They didn’t applaud at the end, and they left shaking their heads, but they were ultimately impressed by what they had seen, and they came to appreciate his creative value. So in the end, peace reigned in the neighborhood.”
A footnote: The architects learned that Rudolph Valentino is not actually buried in Green-Wood Cemetery. “Maybe he was going to be, but he ended up being buried in Hollywood,” Mr. Stigsgaard said.
Even more surreal.
***
posted by Ronnie Rocket @ 12:27 AM
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