Chelsea Pied-à-Terre

The Chelsea Pied-à-Terre Apartment is an East Coast home for a professional couple who permanently reside in Vancouver, British Columbia. Prior to the renovation, the post-war layout had a cramped enclosed kitchen isolated from the windowed living area. To address our client’s desire to have a robust working kitchen, we enlarged, opened, and reoriented the kitchen’s footprint to take advantage of the living room’s daylight. New pale oak herringbone and terrazzo large format tile floors define the living and kitchen/bathroom areas respectively.

Our clients also challenged our team to incorporate a landscape feature (recalling the lush natural landscape from southwestern Canada) to help mitigate downtown Manhattan’s concrete landscape. After much consideration, we reconsidered ‘landscape’ as a custom hand painted wall covering. Canopy beds like the Great Bed of Ware by Hans Vredeman de Vries traditionally used landscape references incorporated into their design. Using this example as a precedent, our custom wall covering is analogous to the canopy bed’s use of upholstery as a space defining ceiling canopy and headboard wall. For our design, collaborated with Calico Wallpaper, the gold-leafed ceiling creates a luminous sky above the bed while the green field anchors the headboard wall. When privacy is not a concern, this room-sized architectural canopy bed becomes a visual focal point from the open living room.

As needed, two large acid-etched glass doors close obscuring visual details while still allowing natural light to filter through the apartment’s different spaces.