Partly this is a product of history. “Many of the idiosyncrasies of the house,” Mr. Kohn says, “have to do with what was here before” – an early 20th-century house, which Mr. Bergman and his wife were hoping to renovate. It proved to be too ramshackle to keep, but for zoning reasons, they retained fragments of its walls and floors. The new house, like the old, has strange half-steps at the middle of each floor, which Mr. Kohn turned to his advantage with small cutouts in the floors and walls: For instance, you can look from the second-floor bedrooms diagonally down into the living room and right out of the house.
The ingredients of the house are actually quite simple: family room and kitchen downstairs, two bedrooms and two baths on the second floor, and a living room on the third floor with a wraparound patio. The individual rooms are tall, handsomely proportioned, and fitted out with built-in storage in every corner. The master bedroom, for instance, has a headboard that hooks sideways into night tables and then an attached closet behind; all the carefully sculpted cabinetry, made of the same shade of mahogany, creates the feeling of a yacht’s interior.
And as on a boat (even a very nice one), nothing seems superfluous. None of the rooms is huge or flashy; each gains luxury from the warmth of its surfaces and its precisely controlled volumes.
There are a lot of quirks, though, if you know where to look. On the second floor hallway, for instance, is a big door; open it and you run into a fixed array of vertical slats that run straight down to the front door below. It’s a maximum-security balcony, with bars crafted out of rich mahogany.
Mr. Bergman was there to oversee every such detail. An experienced amateur builder, he took time away from his job to serve as the general contractor. He also took on a few elements of the design, selecting ochre subway tile for the kitchen and bathrooms and designing a gorgeous backyard with ipe hardwood deck and cedar fencing.
But it’s the adventurous spirit of the Bergmans that makes the house so interesting. Few people would hire an architect to build them a contemporary house with just two bedrooms. And with the Bergmans now parents – their daughter was born during construction – they are even more unusual in how they’re choosing to live and where.
But, interestingly, they’re not alone. Just across the street is another house with a contemporary interior: a Georgian cottage that’s sprouted a dark-grey, three-storey tower by architects Natale Scott. Down the block is another thoughtfully designed residence, a small industrial building that’s been converted by Paul Raff Studio. They aren’t ostentatious buildings, and their addresses don’t have the cachet of a street in Yorkville or Forest Hill, but if they are half as interesting as this Kohn Shnier project, they’re signs of highly artful design quietly remaking a worn stretch of the city.
Editor's note: An earlier online version and the original newspaper version of this story included a photo caption that stated incorrectly that the image was of the living room. It is in fact the third-floor family room. This online version has been corrected.
