They Didn’t Want to Leave the City, So They Updated a Home to Channel the Suburbs

"There he is! There’s my hawk!" Honora Dunham gasps as I step inside the home she shares with her husband, Ted Power, and their two young daughters, Rita and Jean, in Long Island City, Queens. Holding her eldest on her hip, Honora runs to the back of the house through the open-plan first floor toward the rear wall—a wood-trimmed puzzle of floor-to-ceiling windows. I follow Honora’s gaze to a bird perched, stoic, in the pouring rain. "They’re called peregrines," she explains, and this one is a repeat visitor.

It is not surprising that the first thing I noticed inside Ted and Honora’s home was the outside. "The whole house is oriented to the back," says architect Keith Burns, who wanted the renovation to feature a view of the yard (which he finds "fantastic" but "in a weird, cool way"). The rear lot is hemmed in by three masonry walls of about the same, one-and-a-half-story height. This fortuitous alignment of neighboring industrial buildings creates something of "an even datum," says Burns, "kind of like framing the sky."