PHELPS PLACE

Originally built in 1925, this apartment in an historic beaux-arts co-op had lost most of its character in the intervening years. Taking it down to its structure, we reimagined in its ideal form, finding new sightlines and re-proportioning rooms to fit a contemporary work-from-home lifestyle, replicating original woodwork, and inserting new details—seamless coves, custom-milled herringbone floors, and hardware hand-forged by P.E. Guerin in Greenwich Village—that are whimsical yet respectful of the apartment’s elegant setting.

The renovation is an exercise in balanced calibration: inserting walls to articulate spaces and make sense of a formerly chaotic ‘open’ floor plan, blurring corners to visually expand the edges of rooms, rendering walls and trim in a calming monochrome palette contrasted with jewel-box like insertions of boldly figured textures, increasing and decreasing the proportions of individual elements to amplify their perceived scale,  concentrating storage within the thickness of walls to allow interrupted expanses of white space.

Washington, DC

Client: Private

Contractor: Impact Construction

Photography: Jennifer Hughes

Stylist: Kristi Hunter

Published: Architectural Digest