By: Nigel F. Maynard
Project: West Village Duplex / Location: New York City / Architect: The Turett Collaborative, New York City / Interior Designer: Purvi Padia Design, New York City / Photography: Adam Kane Macchia Photography
The owner of this New York City duplex apartment–designer Purvi Padia and her family–came to the conclusion that the space needed a redo. Once they evaluated their likes, dislikes, needs and use of the home, they were ready to make improvements. To make that happen, they tapped The Turett Collaborative, a New York City-based architecture firm.
Mere steps from the Hudson River in the West Village, the duplex is located in a circa 2015 new-build condo that drew design inspiration from the warehouse building that previously occupied the site. “The clients bought the apartment while the building was still under construction and spent a few years living there before engaging our team for a renovation,” says project lead Alex Nizhikovsky, a partner at Turett Collaborative.
[ Read More: A Designer Breathes New Life Into Her Montreal Townhouse ]
From the start, a bespoke attention-grabbing staircase was a central focus in the scope of work, though a new layout and updated finishes were important too. “The original impetus for the project was to rework the entry sequence of the apartment, culminating in the central double-height stair hall,” the firm says in its project statement.
Nizhikovsky says the existing wood and glass straight-run stair bisected the space and created a cramped, inefficient entry hall at the foot of the stair and an overly-large, underutilized landing at the floor above. “To remedy this, we manipulated the walls around it to both make better use of the adjacent spaces and to better define this double-height hall and frame the stair within it, which was lacking in its previous form,” he explains.
[ Read More: A Singapore Apartment Gets an Organic Update ]
After studying many different stair configurations through sketches, digital renderings, and hand-built and 3D-printed models, the team settled on an organic curved stair profile that sweeps through the double-height space. The departure and landing points of the stair allowed for the reconfiguration of the adjacent spaces on the lower and upper floors, creating room for a proper entrance hall and enlarging one of the children’s bedrooms upstairs. The curved stair is encased in a plaster shell–a tight spiral at the inner curve and a large convex shell at the exterior. “The organic softness of this stair provided a welcome contrast to the hard edges and angles of the rest of the apartment,” Nizhikovsky says.
Over the course of the design process, the scope of work increased from a targeted intervention at the stair to a series of additional projects around the home and ultimately to a full revamp of the apartment. Turett Collaborative studied the original construction drawings and conditions on-site to identify opportunities for gaining additional space and rethinking the circulation and organization of the western half of the apartment. Padia, founder of Purvi Padia Design, collaborated closely with the firm, acting as interior designer and selecting new furnishings, accessories, materials, finishes, and artwork throughout the apartments.
[ Read More: Architects Give New Life to a Century-Old Cottage ]
The team gutted all of the bathrooms down to the studs and completely re-did each space. They added new casing, baseboards and doors that were designed by the architect and new lime-wash paint finish specified by Padia’s new home brand Revelry by Purvi Padia. Additionally, the architect updated the layout of the existing kitchen and worked with Revelry on the design of new, custom, hand-painted kitchen cabinets, as well as new den and study millwork.
“We wanted the various spaces around the home to be defined by their own materials versus repeating a handful of the same ones,” Nizhikovsky says. “The continuity maintained among these spaces and materials is through the bespoke and crafted nature of their execution–whether it’s the texture of the lime wash paint on the walls or the plaster of the stair shell, the beautifully figured stone slabs fabricated to fit specific areas or the custom millwork and metalwork throughout. Nothing feels ‘off-the-shelf,’ and even when more stock elements are used, they are a part of a larger handcrafted assembly. The design of each of these spaces was about highlighting these materials and how they’re assembled and meant to be used.”
