A black corrugated-steel exterior belies the bright, open-plan layout of this refurbished townhouse
WORDS JESSICA MAIRS PHOTOGRAPHY MATTHEW WILLIAMS AND RAFAEL GAMO
When their first child, Gabe, was born in 2017, lawyers Nick Gaffney and Fei Zhong decided to trade in their apartment in East Village, New York, USA, for a family home in Brooklyn. Properties in the borough are in such high demand that it took eight months to find a three-storey, mid-terrace house in the South Slope neighbourhood. Measuring just 4.5m wide, it’s one of a row of timber-clad homes built around 1910 and had a basement used for storage, a kitchen and two small living rooms on the ground level, and two bedrooms with a bathroom on the first floor. ‘The house needed fixing up, but we felt it had space for us to grow into and knew we could move in right away,’ says Fei.
The birth of their second child, Adeline, in 2019 prompted Nick and Fei to start on the improvements, which focused on giving the ground floor a more open-plan design and the first floor an extra bedroom and bathroom. ‘We wanted to find an architect who understood our limitations and our vision,’ says Fei.
Luckily they found inspiration nearby. ‘We kept walking past a house that we both really admired,’ says Fei. ‘It’s home to architect Aniket Shahane. Nick and I paid a visit and we totally fell in love with it, so we ended up appointing him.’
Nick, Fei and Aniket spent a year finetuning a scheme that would team the home’s historic features with minimalist materials. ‘I worked hard to create a design that was within Nick and Fei’s budget,’ says Aniket. ‘There had to be a few sacrifices though, including leaving the basement out of the initial phase of works and concentrating on the other two floors.’
Renovations began in spring 2020, just as Covid restrictions came into force. Nick, Fei and the children stayed with family in Connecticut while Aniket managed the build on site. ‘One benefit to starting demolition in lockdown was that it gave us more time to think,’ says Nick. ‘We ended up creating a small office space in the main bedroom, along with an island that doubles as a desk in the kitchen, which we hadn’t considered before.’
On the ground floor the construction team removed all the internal partitions and moved the kitchen from the rear of the house to the centre. ‘The kitchen island divides up the space without having to put up any walls,’ explains Aniket. Fei, who at first was sceptical about the idea, now appreciates tha
