K Residence

Located in Midtown Manhattan, this 600sf 1-Bedroom apartment required a re-modeling to meet the changing needs of the owners. For this young, professional couple with two small children, the existing apartment layout lacked both flexibility and personality to accommodate their life style. The strict separation between bedroom and living room had become problematic with the arrival of the children and the existing closet and storage spaces were not adequate any longer for a family of four.

In re-thinking the organization and flow of the apartment we were confronted with one
mayor problem: How to accommodate additional storage spaces while simultaneously opening up the apartment and making it more continuous -spatially as well as program-wise. The bathroom and closet area of the existing place created a dark bottleneck and isolated the bedroom. The family preferred to use the entire apartment during the day for a variety of activities and the bedroom as a sleeping quarter for the children. The living room therefore also needed to double as the parent’s bedroom while also being utilized for
dining, leisure, and entertainment activities.

Our solution to address all these issues within a strongly limited space was to introduce a multi-functional, multi-programmatic design piece, which we dubbed the “Interior Sleeve”. This element has the capacity to blend the two sides of the apartment together in an
elegant and unobtrusive way, while also providing much needed storage room as well as visual and spatial connectivity throughout the apartment. The Interior Sleeve wraps around walls and ceiling, thickening and thinning at times, providing spatial nooks and niches
without fixed programmatic boundaries. In addition, the space is further freed up by an open kitchen design and naturally illuminated through the addition of two new skylights.