02 — Architecture + Interior Design

West 11th Townhouse

Location: Greenwich Village, New York
Scope: Architecture + Interior Design
Year: 2025
Area: 6,800 sq ft

A nineteenth-century Greenwich Village townhouse reimagined as a quiet contemporary home while preserving the proportions, craftsmanship, and character of the original structure.

Classic brownstone façades with bay windows behind a line of street trees — West 11th Street. The façade was repointed and the original stoop rebuilt in matching brownstone.

Note

Historic molding

The parlour floor still held most of its original plasterwork, buried under a century of paint. We stripped the cornices by hand, recast the missing lengths of egg-and-dart from moulds taken on site, and restored both ceiling medallions. Nothing was added that the house did not already have; the work was to let the original profiles read sharply again.

Coffered stone vault and arched window seen from below, lit by small recessed lights — The restored stair vault, recast in lime plaster.

Parlour with arched steel windows, a white brick fireplace and exposed timber beams — Parlour floor, with the new garden glazing beyond.

Note

Plaster walls

Throughout the upper floors, walls are finished in a hand-trowelled lime plaster tinted with raw umber. It is breathable, which matters in an old masonry house, and it holds light softly — morning sun moves across it in long gradients rather than a flat glare. Small irregularities were left in on purpose.

Receding plaster arches washed with daylight, a sheer linen curtain and a carved timber stool

Note

Natural light

The rear façade had been rebuilt in the 1960s with small, mean windows. We replaced it with a steel-framed wall of glazing on the garden and parlour levels, aligned to the original floor heights. Light now reaches the centre of the plan, and the stair becomes a vertical lantern at the heart of the house.

Close-up of quarter-sawn oak with fine, straight grain

Layered natural travertine with cream and ochre mineral banding

Close view of hand-trowelled grey lime plaster with soft tonal movement

Note

Natural oak

Floors are rift and quarter-sawn white oak in wide boards, finished with a hard-wax oil rather than lacquer. The same oak forms the stair treads, window seats and kitchen joinery, so the house reads as one continuous material from garden to bedroom.

Note

Travertine

An unfilled Roman travertine was chosen for the kitchen, the garden-level floor and the primary bath. Its open pores and warm banding soften with use; we specified a honed finish so that it would patinate rather than polish.

Sunken plaster seating nook with round porthole windows, linen cushions and a stone table — PlateThe top-floor study: a sunken plaster seat beneath two round windows cut into the rebuilt rear dormer.

Pale oak sideboard with open cubbies, ceramics and dried branches against a white wall

Note

Custom millwork

Every cabinet, bookcase and radiator enclosure was drawn in-house and built by a small joinery workshop in Greenpoint. Proportions were taken from the original door casings, so the new work sits in the same rhythm as the house's nineteenth-century carpentry.

Upholstered lounge chair in oatmeal bouclé on a slender swivel base

Drawing

Longitudinal section. The new rear façade and central stair bring daylight through the full depth of the plan.

Material restraint

Four materials — oak, lime plaster, travertine and blackened steel — carry the entire house. Restraint was not an aesthetic position so much as a practical one: fewer materials meant fewer junctions, better craftsmanship at each of them, and a home that will age as a single, coherent thing.

Credits

Architecture: Marlow & Finch
Interiors: Marlow & Finch
Contractor: Brennan & Sons Builders
Millwork: Greenpoint Joinery Co.
Plasterwork: Hudson Lime & Plaster
Photography: Placeholder imagery via Unsplash