Red Hook is “the farthest you can get from New York while still being in New York,” quips Anna Clark of the once-industrial waterfront area of Brooklyn. The village-like neighborhood’s sense of remove from the wider city and opportunities for live/work space were part of the appeal when Anna, an artist/book publisher/radio host, and her partner, designer and musician Thanhyen Nguyen, bought a three-story townhouse there in 2019.

Located just a few blocks from where the couple had been renting, the 1,862-square-foot space is one of five that incorporate elements of a large early-20th-century carriage house. When they found it, the double-height ground floor and increasingly compact living spaces upstairs—with setbacks that create a series of terraces—offered an ideal floor plan. “We liked to call it the layer cake house because it reminded us of boxes stacked on boxes,” Thanh says. “The farther up you went into the house, the smaller the boxes became.”

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Thanh and Anna envisioned creating distinct living, working, and entertaining spaces inside the house, and they reached out to a friend, designer and building technology consultant Gjergji Shkurti, for his advice about who should design it. He recommended Aria Jahanshahi, principal at Opa Architecture in New York City, and the three hit it off. As self-described creatives, the couple appreciated Jahanshahi’s collaborative approach. “We didn’t want to just say yes or no to choices that were being made,” Thanh says. “We really wanted to be a part of the process.”

A crucial decision was to move the primary entry to the large metal doors of the original carriage house, converting what had become a garage into a grand version of a mudroom with a skylight, storage, and space to park the couple’s motorcycles. The mudroom opens into a living, dining, and kitchen area hung with paintings and anchored by tall bookshelves reaching for the high ceilings.

Next to the new entrance, the previous front door and adjoining windows now provide light for Anna’s ceramics studio. Presiding over it all—and replacing a dubiously constructed loft—is Thanh’s soundproof music studio. A cozy box, it has a small window into the living/dining area on one side and a second into the mudroom/garage on the other, allowing him to DJ for guests inside—or, when the carriage doors are open, the entire block.

“It was exciting to have my peer group as a client, because we often spoke in a shorthand that pulled from the same histories and interests.”
—Aria Jahanshahi, architect

Jahanshahi’s big move is a curving staircase wrapped in white-painted steel leading up to Thanh’s perch. A large but elegant sculptural presence in the living room, it nods to the architecture of John Hejduk but plays the role of a Brooklyn stoop when guests sit on it. “The couple were willing to take risks, and not just with materials, but with whole concepts,” Jahanshahi says.

Meanwhile, in those layer-cake boxes upstairs, Jahanshahi tweaked the primary bedroom layout slightly but saved his sense of play and experimentation for the small bathrooms typical of New York City. For the guest bathroom, he paired a heavy black tile floor with a black acrylic ceiling, creating a sense of infinite vertical space.

“We have the ability to work privately in our studios, but then we also have these spaces where we spend a lot of our time together.”
—Anna Clark, resident

In the main bathroom, he added a curving ceiling above the bathtub and inset strips of LED lighting that blur the edges of the narrow space, making it feel less confined. “This was really about turning individual rooms into dramatic spaces that surprise a visitor as they move through this very tall townhouse,” Jahanshahi says. Case in point: The roof deck reveals a striking view of the Manhattan skyline. Nearby, but still a world away.

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Opa Architecture / @opa.space

Construction: De Lux Construction

Lighting Design: Opa Architecture

Millwork: Figure Ground

Interior Design: Gjergji Shkurti

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