Architecture Wednesday: Brooklyn Carriage House

This home, a one of a kind converted carriage house in Brooklyn, offers bright, loft like proportions with soaring ceilings, skylights and walls of glass that seamlessly integrate indoor/outdoor living. With three en-suite bedrooms—plus an extra half bath—a massive living area, huge eat in kitchen and the kicker, you’re own private parking garage it’s a winner with a rent of just $9,900 a month!

Now, I grant you that it’s not the most beautiful exterior, unless you’re a lover of graffiti but let’s step inside and see if your mind changes .. after parking and entering through the private garage you are greeted with an entire floor dedicated to living and dining with dramatic 12-foot ceilings, painted exposed brick, mosaic tiles, and a wall of southeast facing glass that offers incredible light throughout the day and there’s even an incredibly distinctive Red Spiral staircase.

The kitchen was designed as the centerpiece of the home for cooking and entertaining, and features over 30 feet of counter space, a 6-burner range with double ovens, four under-counter refrigerated drawers and two under-counter freezer drawers and, why not, two dishwashers.

At the back of the house is the living area with a wall of glass that lets in incredible light from the private courtyard with 12foot surrounding walls that mimic the walls of the living space and create a seamless visual connection between indoors and outdoors; and while it is currently bare in the winter, it transforms into a green oasis during the warmer spring and summer months.

If you head up the Red Spiral stairs you find three en-suite bedrooms as well as a plethora of skylights and windows for more incredible light. The primary suite is at the back of the house and features the same wall of glass as below. The bedroom is huge and fits a king-size bed and plenty of room to spare for the large soaking tub right in the bedroom! The en-suite bathroom is huge with a window and includes a walk-in shower with rain head, a double sink and a toilet and bidet.

The second bedroom suite is at the front of the house and is also a huge king-size room with a massive skylight overhead. This bedroom features a wall unit with built in desk and the en-suite bath has three large windows with a tub with shower, toilet and sink.

The third bedroom is a queen-size room with another massive skylight; the sink and vanity mirror are in the corner of bedroom and the en-suite bath has a large walk-in shower with rain head and a toilet.

Take the Red Spiral stairs down and you find a finished basement, perfect for an art or music studio, kids’ playroom or media-screening room. There is also a half bath and laundry with washer and dryer.

The distinctive mosaic tile throughout the house is radiant heated and feels incredibly warm under foot during the winter months and cool in the summer months thanks to the zoned AC throughout. The house is conveniently located in the heart of Bushwick and is surrounded by amazing bars, restaurants, coffee shops and incredibly close to transportation.

If you’re into lots of color in a very urban environment and have around 10K a month …

As always click to emBIGGERate …

The Spaces

Teresa Klein Called the Police on a Black Child Who Bumped Into Her

In Brooklyn last week, Teresa Klein, a white woman called the police claiming that a young black boy touched her behind in a Brooklyn deli.

Yes, she did. Klein was quickly labeled “Cornerstore Caroline” by Jason Littlejohn, a Flatbush resident who recorded the commotion outside of the Sahara Deli Market, in which Klein rails in a phone call to police:

“I was just sexually assaulted by a child. The son grabbed my ass and she decided to yell at me.”

The boy, who is about 9, burst into tears as bystanders confronted Klein about the incident.

Here’s what happened … Klein was in the bodega and a young boy was standing nearby; as that child turned, his backpack brushed against Klein’s backside and she went off, accusing a nine-year-old boy of sexual assault.

But he was a black child … shades of Emmett Till who was murdered years ago because a white woman lied about him making advances toward her. Thank the goddess we moved on a half-step from those days.

And thank the goddess for cell phones and surveillance cameras, because now everyone, including Teresa Klein, knows that she overreacted.

For three days this story was all over social media, with cellphone and instore camera footage, detailing the events, and finally, at the end of the week, Teresa Klein returned to the store to buy cigarettes and to face her neighbors, who heckled her as she spoke to journalists.

Then, and only after being prompted by a reporter, Klein entered the store to see the footage of this little bump with a backpack. And only then did Klein apologize:

“Young man. I don’t know your name but I’m sorry.”

Klein denies acting out of bigotry toward the boy but complained that the child’s mother reacted aggressively when she said the boy had touched her.

Huh; you shriek at a child, and accuse him of sexual assault, and then, when his mother steps in to defend her child, she acts defensively? Go figure.

Stop it. White people, just stop it. I don’t care who the president is, or how he acts, we should be better than this.

If you scared a black child’s gonna grab your ass, stay home!

If you’re afraid of black people barbecuing in the park stay out of the park!

If you’re nervous about two black men sitting in Starbucks, drink your goddamned coffee at home!

If seeing a young black child mowing a neighbor’s lawn causes you concern, sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up!

If you spot a black man babysitting two white kids and you think there’s something sinister happening, go home!

And as for you white people who also see these things and hear these things and find this kind of blatant racist behavior unacceptable, you need to speak up, too, or you might just wanna stay home yourselves.

Say something to the racists. Shine a light on them and their behavior will crawl back under a rock where it belongs.

NYT

Anna Was Raped By Police Officers ... And It Was "Legal"

Anna—her last name has not been made public though she is known on social media as Anna Chambers ... not her real name—was sitting with two friends in a parked car when a charcoal gray van pulled up; two men got out and used their flashlights to see inside the car.

The men also flashed their badges and began asking questions. When they discovered marijuana in a cupholder, they ordered Anna and her friends out of the car. Anna was handcuffed, but her two male friends were told they could leave, and then the two officers took Anna into the back of that unmarked police van with tinted windows.

Inside the car each man raped Anna—who was crying and shouting ‘No’—through the streets of Brooklyn, stopping every so often to switch places and allow one to drive and the other to rape the young girl.

About an hour later, but just a few minutes’ drive from where these men took Anna, the detectives dropped Anna off on the side of the road; surveillance footage shows she was about a half-mile from a police station. She stood there, arms wrapped around herself, pacing, until she found a stranger who let her use a cell phone to call a friend.

The detectives didn’t arrest Anna; they issued no citation; they filed no paperwork about the stop. Once Anna returned home, her mother took her to the hospital where the semen collected in Anna’s rape kit was discovered to be DNA matches for Detectives Eddie Martins and Richard Hall of the Brooklyn South narcotics unit.

Both men have since resigned from the force and been charged with rape. A simple case, everyone, including Anna, thought: two cops dragged her from a car, put her in a van, drove around town and raped her. Simple.

But … in New York, there is no law specifically stating that it is illegal for police officers or sheriff’s deputies in the field to have sex with someone in their custody.

Let that sink in; it isn’t a crime for a police officer to take someone into custody and have sex with them; most officers caught in the act claim the sex to be consensual.

Some states have closed this “rape” loophole, but most have not because few people realize the loophole exists and because it is politically unpopular to push laws that target cops and anger their powerful unions.

So, they let a loophole that allows police officers to legally rape detainees because they don’t wish to piss off their union? Seriously?

Luckily, some good has come from Anna’s case, in that it has brought new attention to the loophole. On October 26, New York City Council member Mark Treyger—inspired and repulsed by Anna’s story—proposed a bill to make it illegal for police officers to have sex with anyone in their custody.

Seriously; they have to propose a bill to make rape a crime, in the case of police officers raping people in their custody.

Hopefully Anna’s case will be the end of that loophole.

Defendants Martins and Hall haven’t told their side though their lawyers have made it clear that they are pursuing the consensual sex defense; you know, Anna was removed from a car, her two male friends sent away, she was placed in handcuffs, driven around for hours, and raped repeatedly and then just let go. No charges filed against her for anything.

Again, let that sink in …and then remember that Anna will be taking this to trial, and she will not give up; she will not stop until, in America, it becomes illegal for a police officer to rape anyone.

Buzzfeed

Architecture Wednesday: Irving Place

So I’ll start talking about this home in Brooklyn by first going way Down Under to Christchurch, New Zealand.

From the early 2000s, Christchurch has been devastated by a series of earthquakes, but they are rebuilding. However, being an island nation, a lot of the good that come into Christchurch come in large shipping containers, as big as whole rooms, and some folks took to using the shipping containers to quickly rebuild the shops and offices in the town, while others used the containers to rebuild their own homes.

Up in Brooklyn, the Irving Place Carriage House was a nice simple row-house on a street of row-houses. As usual, though, the space wasn’t big enough for the owners and their family, so the 1930s two-level carriage house was remodeled to add a penthouse on top.

And that was achieved by the insertion of a single vertical volume—a shipping container—that crosses the entire house from the roof to the ground where the penthouse, retrofitted from four shipping containers, provides access to a rooftop deck.

The vertical volume—orange, like the penthouse containers—intersects the carriage house and organizes kitchen, bathrooms, mechanical space, and the stairs, whose incline generates all of the diagonal cuts.

This volume also separates the space in two: at the ground level there is an entrance and mud room in the front with dining and living spaces at the rear; at the upper level, the master bedroom is in the front and kid’s bedroom at the rear.

I like the ingenuity of using the shipping container, end up, as a sort of room, staircase, mechanicals closet, but, while I like orange, this might be a bit too much orange.

Still, you gotta give credit to a mind that created a stacked shipping container inside a nearly one-hundred –year-old house as a means of expanding the space.

HomeDSGN

Architecture Wednesday: Firehouse Conversion

The building was originally erected in the 19th century as a two-story firehouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

The sleeping quarters were on the 2nd floor while the horses and buggies were housed on the ground floor; when fire trucks replaced the buggies, the structure of the ground floor was upgraded.

The firehouse closed in the 1970s and became a sculptor’s studio until the current owner, a photographer, purchased it.

It was mostly dilapidated by then; the roof was falling apart and there were no fireman poles left. The project included the conversion of the ground floor into a photo studio and gallery space, and the second floor into living spaces for the owner, bedrooms for his daughters; a third story penthouse was added which includes the master suite, a lounge and a rooftop garden.

One of the main objectives of the project was to achieve a balance of privacy and natural light, which was accomplished by the addition of a light well that penetrates the house from the new third floor roof down to the center of the second floor, washing the kitchen in daylight.

A bridge passes through this sky lit space and connects the lounge to the master bedroom suite, around which a walled-in rooftop wraps around the corner of the penthouse to allow for rooftop strolls.

I do wish that some of the old charm of the firehouse could have been maintained ... or, at the very least, it came with an on-site fireman.

HomeDSGN

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