The Ridgewood Project: Painting

I like how this looks. Maybe I should just leave it as it is now.

The Ridgewood Project: Green Walls and Pocket Doors

This house is tugging at the romantic in me. Why would you want regular doors that flap around when you want the threshold to be open, when you can have pocket doors that simply slide into the wall and disappear?

On a side note, I wasn't very keen on the green walls, but they, too, have grown on me. What to do?!

The Ridgewood Project: Dumbwaiter

The Ridgewood Project: Horror Vacui

Someone was obviously very fond of botanical wallpaper.

The Ridgewood Project: Trim

In general, I like wall trimmings, picture mouldings and other such creatures. I like designing them and seeing how they define a room. But before we moved, I was going through a mega Barragan kick and was aiming to design all our spaces with straight, flat, uncluttered, boring walls. Now that we've been here for a week and a half, these elements are really growing on me. Particularly the brown, fern wallpaper.

The Ridgewood Project: The Grilles

There happen to be these rectangular panels on the walls; you can see one of them in the image above. The image is a bit cut off, but you can still see it on the far lower left(ish) corner. We first thought they might be something electrical related; silly architects. Alas, they are not. When I first started to peel off the vinyl flooring and poke my head here and there, I also pried off one of these panels. Behold, there was a sheet metal lined shaft in the wall:

When I held the metal panel in the light, there seemed to be some kind of pattern embedded on it, behind the layers of paint. And on the underside of the panel was a bed of plaster. I started chipping away at it with my chisels. Damn it all - that stuff is hard! But suddenly, this emerged:

I suppose this was from when the house was heated by a coal or wood burning stove, and the heat traveled up through the walls and into the rooms via these grilles. Amazing, no?

The Ridgewood Project

I recently moved to Ridgewood, Queens. Last week, in fact. I needed more space to work in, and a new project to work on, and both my husband and I were looking for an adventure. So we said adieu to Brooklyn, hello to Queens.

Six months ago, we found this old brick townhouse in a neighborhood on the border of Queens and Brooklyn. It was first settled by a German community in the early 20th century, during which time these houses were constructed. The facades are all made of yellow brick. There are ones with front porches and ones that are three to four family apartment buildings, but ours is a two family, bay window townhouse. It turns out the same family owned this house since it was built. And now that we've started cleaning and uncovering the floors, we've unearthed artifacts that point to an older, more mythic New York City. Inside the walls, under the floors, in the corners of the rooms. So stay tuned.....

New Lamp Photos

These are some new photos we've been taking of the lamps,

for our website, and a new look book.