Lost and Found: The Elastic Interior

New York Its a common enough dream for those who live in cramped urban spaces: Suddenly you notice a door you never realized was there and beyond it a room you didnt know you had or maybe an entire wing of your home, just waiting to be occupied.

Thats more or less what happened to Chris Cooper and Jennifer Hanlin last year. Only it wasnt a dream.

Cooper, 46, an architect, explains their discovery of an additional 325 square feet in their Brooklyn condominium as merely a matter of applying what he calls reductive simplicity. He and Hanlin, 44, an interior designer, were inspired by Japanese design, he said: In Tokyo, theres the hustle and bustle, and then you walk into a garden or a tatami room and theres calm. We wanted our home to be neutral, contemplative and calm.

True, that always makes a space feel bigger. But it also helps if you actually happen to have a room you had sort of forgotten about an unused mezzanine, say. To be fair, it wasnt exactly a mezzanine when the couple bought the apartment in 2005, for $675,000. Most of it was a crawl space that housed the water heater.

Cooper, Hanlin and their 11-year-old twins, Mia and Felix, live on the fifth and sixth floors of a Cobble Hill building that once housed the School of the Sacred Hearts and was converted into a 34-unit condominium in the 1980s. Before the conversion, their apartment was three separate spaces: a classroom, a boys bathroom and a mechanical room.

They began their act of reductive simplicity by gutting most of the apartment. To create a soaring living area that would feel bigger than it was, they raised part of the ceiling on the lower level. The rest of the lower-level ceiling was dropped, so they could insert a library and television room into the crawl space above. They used slatted wood partitions to bring light into those rooms from the living area below, and added lots of built-in storage.

And like magic, when the $300,000 renovation was complete, their apartment had gone from 1,375 square feet to 1,700 square feet not an enormous addition, but an addition nonetheless.

To ensure privacy, each of the bedrooms is on a different level.

Continued here:
Lost and Found: The Elastic Interior