![Standing Out Amid Monotony in Residential Design]()
David Boyle's home, made from six shipping containers, at 351 Keap Street. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Yet amid the monotony, there are some owners and designers doing different work. Some of it is driven by the neighborhood’s transformation from unconventional to fashionable, attracting wealthy, artistic types who want private homes that are both luxurious and high-design. Other projects exist as a cascading effect of Williamsburg’s increasing population and wealth, including new styles of public buildings and experiments in sustainability like Mr. Boyle’s, created as antidotes to profit-driven development.
Mr. Boyle, a self-described handyman who built what he said was the first shipping container house in the city, completed his 1,600-square-foot home after three years of construction and struggles with the Buildings Department over matters like the size of the lot (a relatively small 20 feet by 40 feet) and the structure’s fire rating. The house’s materials and its furnishings are nearly all found or recycled. The six steel shipping containers that form the shell of the building cost $1,500 each.
Mr. Boyle and his wife, Michele Bertomen, originally wanted to build a traditional house, but the estimated cost, about $500,000, was prohibitive, he said. So they instead built a simple three-story home where ceramic paint serves as the insulation and piping under the concrete floor provides heat. A light-filled stairway and I-beams connect the containers, which are stacked in two piles three feet apart. Kitchen implements stick to the walls with magnets. The construction cost came to about $400,000, but Mr. Boyle said it would have cost about $300,000 if not for additional financing costs caused by delays.
“I never would have believed that I would live in a little castle,” he said, adding that for years he and his wife lived illegally in a cellar. “It’s a remarkable turn of circumstance.”
Another shipping container house is going up in the neighborhood, but with a far more extravagant design. LOT-EK, a global architecture firm, is building a one-of-a-kind luxury home for a family out of 21 shipping containers on a 25-foot-by-100-foot corner lot at 2 Monitor Street.
The house, which has been stacked but not yet finished, is sculptural in nature, resembling a large monolith jutting diagonally out of the ground, a comment on the neighborhood’s industrial past. The slanted plan allows for outdoor space on each of the home’s four levels. There will be stadium seating in the first-floor theater and a small pool in the rear courtyard.
“We definitely wanted to distinguish it very much from the building you see next to it,” said Giuseppe Lignano, an architect at LOT-EK, referring to a four-story, glass-walled condo. The cost of this container house is private, but three years ago, its owners paid $700,000 for the lot, which contained a house they demolished.
Several more design-forward mansions are going up in Williamsburg. One will be on Grand Street between Wythe Avenue and Berry Street across from a public school, where an existing three-story building will be demolished to create a five-story structure for an art-loving couple in their 60s who recently sold their 6,000-square-foot loft in TriBeCa.
The bedroom in Mr. Boyle's home. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Its front facade will be of unadorned red brick, to blend with the other buildings on the once working-class block. Just behind that will rise a modernist glass-and-steel structure resembling a factory with transparent walls. There will be commercial space on the ground floor and apartments on the second floor for the couple’s daughters.
“It looks industrial in the spirit of Williamsburg,” said the architect, Aldo Andreoli, owner of AA Studio.
Seemingly all architects these days, Mr. Andreoli added, are in pursuit of “the Williamsburg aesthetic” — salvaging the industrial past, whether by saving old bricks or beams or exposing a mechanical system, while adding contemporary elements. A highlight of that style is the Wythe Hotel at Wythe Avenue and North 11th Street, which has won acclaim for successfully marrying the repurposed red brick warehouse that forms its core with a modern, airy structure of glass on its roof.
Just across the street, Kinfolk Studios is experimenting with architecture inside. It is constructing a cedar geodesic dome that looks as though it has been cracked open like a walnut inside a high-ceilinged warehouse at 94 Wythe. The design, which will be the central feature of a new lounge and performance space opening next month, is meant to be a nod to the 1970s fantasy of living in a geodesic dome, and something wholly original.
“The idea was to kind of make it as far away from Brooklyn as possible,” said Felipe Delerme, Kinfolk’s communication director.
Heather Roslund, an architect who formerly headed the land-use committee for the area’s community board, said she saw most of the new residential development in Williamsburg as a “sea of banality” focused on maximizing profit and buildable square feet. Yet the growth has led to some new public structures that she likes, including the parks department building at Bushwick Inlet Park at North Ninth Street and Kent Avenue, whose grass-covered roof slopes down to the playing fields in a graceful curve.
“It’s lovely, interesting and subtle,” Ms. Roslund said.
She also praised the new Emergency Medical Services ambulance depot at 288 Metropolitan Avenue. Completed in 2013 through a design-excellence program, it has a glassy facade that glows at night and a double-height glass entry that sends daylight streaming through the building.
Yet as in all things, there are critics: in this case, Lt. Richard Smith of the Fire Department, who was working there on a frigid morning last week as heating contractors tried to assess why the building was having a problem staying warm.
“It’s because of all that glass,” Lieutenant Smith said. “It’s definitely an architecture thing for people who are into that, but in my opinion, it’s a pain.”
> via NYT
