High and Mighty

Words and styling Kathryn Neale
Photography Jason Frank Rothenberg

From industrial factory to dream apartment, this New York home led the charge for going upmarket in downtown.

I confess to being obsessed with rooftops. My husband and I chose our apartment in New York specifically because we retained sole rights to a private oasis on high. I must admit though that ours, replete with the half-orb barbeque and a blow-up kiddie pool, need bow its head in the face of architect Matthew Baird’s slickly conceived outdoor living space. Baird’s open fireplace and bench seating around a decked courtyard might just be the perfect setting to watch the sun set over Manhattan.

Matthew Baird always knew he wanted to design buildings. His grandfather was an architect who started a family practice in central Pennsylvania, which developed into a well-established regional business. After the 1920s, Baird’s grandfather struck out on his own and made a name for himself in New York, but eventually returned to the family practice. Clearly this sensibility has passed on through the generations. “He was an architect and he had a great life doing it. I always remembered that,” Baird recalls.

Baird received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and a Masters from Columbia, both in the field of architecture. He worked as the project architect on New York’s Museum of Folk Art through 2001 before leaving the firm Tod Williams Billie Tsien to start out on his own. Within a year he was approached about designing a rundown townhouse in New York’s now uber-hip Meat-Packing District. It was a dream project: a chance to build from the ground up. The client, however, was interviewing so many big name architects, that Baird considered his chances slim. But when the call came, the voice said, “I have good news and bad. The good news is you got the job. The bad news is we’re leaving in five days for a ski trip and we want to see a scheme before we go.”

Baird didn’t hear anything after ‘You got the job’. “I was on the moon.” With next to no time to prepare, instinct came to the rescue. “I just sat down and drew exactly what I thought should be built here. I did one scheme. I showed it to her, and the scariest part was that she simply said, ‘I love it. When do we start?’”

The brief was to turn a rough and tumble, abandoned former butchery, circa 1956, into a townhouse that reflected the then gritty, industrial neighborhood. “The house was located in the meat packing district just a couple of years before it became The Meat Packing District,” says Baird (a seismic, almost overnight change, as any who have seen the area lately can testify). “When I came up with the façade, it was pretty distinct. I wanted an abstract combination of planes. I was also interested in materiality relative to the area.” Baird remembers: “The building was just falling in on itself. It was a total wreck.”

Recalling his experience on the 30,000 sq ft Museum of Folk Art, Baird knew taking on the project meant being there “from the first sketch to the final punch list, making it happen.” This project shared many similarities and he quickly relied on the same hands-on approach. Looking at the building today on its pretty, cobblestone street, you can’t help but smirk. The intense concrete façade interrupts the quaint brownstones and the self-congratulatory cognoscenti ambling into the nearby chic bistro Pastis and members-only club SoHo House.

The back of the building is essentially naked, providing a stark juxtaposition. Excited to explore the “duality of the solid façade and this open back,” Baird designed the entire back wall as one giant panel of glass, creating a picture-perfect view of the quintessential New York courtyard. “Often people come by and from the exterior of the front they are like, ‘Wow, it must be pretty dark in there.’ Then you open it up and all of a sudden it’s flooded with light. That experience was designed into the house, to have that sort of surprise.” The concrete façade at the front of the house is attached with striking steel girders. Recessed windows afford the occupants diagonal views of the street but contribute further to the misconception of the place as a secretive hide-away.

When asked about the structural difficulties of affixing a metal sheet one-and-a-half inches thick and three stories high to a building, Baird laughs. “I remember waking up at least twice and thinking, ‘Have I sent those dimensions to the structural engineer?’ So I would, over and over again. He finally called me to say, ‘If you send these one more time, I’ll think you’re nuts!’” The plate, made from poured concrete, weighs over 17 tonnes. Baird deadpans, “It’s a little complicated how we attached it. The registration had to be perfect.”

For the rest of the house, Baird wanted to test new materials with bold ideas. “We didn’t want anything pristine. I’d shown them a few projects and they liked the experimental materiality of our work. As an architect I am interested in investigating and trying to do things with new materials that haven’t been done before. The staircase in this house is made of cast polyurethane – the same stuff rollerblade wheels are made of.”

At 600sq ft, each floor of the house is quite shallow, so Baird endeavored to keep the planes as open as possible. The sub-street level media room has a 20ft roof that breaks into the ground floor. A balcony from the first floor offers vertiginous vistas from on high. Indeed, being able to see from floor to floor, through open stairwells or where a floor/ceiling would typically be, is a recurring feature. The issue of a five-floor house having no elevator came up but “the couple were so young and full of energy,” that the idea of an unwieldy lift was quickly quashed.

It’s fitting then that the overriding feeling of the house is one of energy. On the day Urbis shot the house, the children who live there ran up and down the open stairs with abandon. Even the crew couldn’t resist climbing a few extra stairs to eat lunch on the roof. Maybe it’s because possibilities of life seem endless when the view from your courtyard stretches across the world’s most vibrant city, all the way to the horizon.