How They Pulled It Off: A Glowing Orange Door Delineates a Cozy Bedroom for a New York Studio
Prioritizing storage and privacy, a first time homeowner puts her stamp on a historic Chelsea loft with her own personal sunset.
Prioritizing storage and privacy, a first time homeowner puts her stamp on a historic Chelsea loft with her own personal sunset.
Welcome to How They Pulled It Off, where we take a close look at one particularly challenging aspect of a home design and get the nitty-gritty details about how it became a reality.
When a new homeowner purchased an apartment in a converted industrial warehouse in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, she turned to architect and interior designer Robert Garneau to integrate ample storage space—namely for clothes and books. Originally seeing Garneau’s Transformer Apartment in Dwell, she was eager to integrate similar creative and space-saving measures into her own 1,000 square foot home.
"The client emphasized the importance of efficient, comprehensive storage for her belongings," says Garneau, founding partner of New York-based Architecture Workshop. "She wanted most of her belongings to be out of sight, with the exception of a few areas to display cherished items, especially her extensive book collection." A wall of live edge floating shelves—hewn from a single log—gave her ample space for her personal library and created a dramatic focal point in the main living area.
Original to the 1918 building, the wood columns and beams retain remnants of paint from years past. Opposite the columns, the live edge library wall is made from a single log, cut down the middle, and sliced into thick shelves.
Photo by Robert Garneau
Another key priority of the renovation was creating a semi-private bedroom space in the oversized studio—while maintaining sightlines to the apartment’s single wall of windows. "Aside from seamlessly integrating a vast amount of storage, the biggest design challenge was dealing with the sparse amount of available sunlight," says Garneau. "Extensive floor-to-ceiling cabinetry was devised to act as walls, effectively carving a separate sleeping area while maintaining visual openness and sightlines to the windows."
Transforming the oversized studio, Garneau was tasked with finding a privacy solution that would define the sleeping space, while maintaining visual connection to the rest of the apartment. Creating fluidity between the new sleeping area and living space, a translucent orange door was introduced. The oversized door, says Garneau, was "the key spatial move allowing the bedroom to have privacy, while maintaining cohesive continuity with the rest of the apartment."
An orange resin door playfully pivots open and closed to partially separate the sleeping area from the rest of the apartment.
Photo by Robert Garneau
"We felt the apartment was often starved for light, so we wanted to inject our own sunlight into the space—on demand sunsets and sunrises!" says architect and interior designer Robert Garneau.
Photo by Robert Garneau
See the full story on Dwell.com: How They Pulled It Off: A Glowing Orange Door Delineates a Cozy Bedroom for a New York Studio
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