Riverside Penthouse

Category : House

Location New York, NY
Year 2022
Design Team Shuji Suzumori, Yukari Honda, Sato K, Tomo A
Size 2,400 sf
Construction Think Construction
Photography Conor Harrigan

Riverside Penthouse is a 2,400sf 1-bedroom penthouse duplex that transforms into a 2,400sf 4-bedroom apartment. Like a piece of clothing, the apartment responds and adjusts to the resident’s needs throughout the days and seasons. Designed and constructed during the Covid-19 Pandemic, the project provides solutions for flexible lifestyles linked to increasingly dynamic family and social structures, within an existing historical building.

By removing excessive partitions that had divided up the apartment into small rooms, the floor plan was opened up to create view corridors and maximize natural light and cross ventilation. Select walls were thickened to house bookshelves, storage, and sliding doors, placed strategically to softly divide up the open floor plan. The upper floor sunroom was converted into a light filled library with a raised floor perimeter to maximize the views of the Hudson River below. For everyday use, this open configuration of the apartment with multiple areas (vs rooms) to live and work suits the lifestyle of a professional couple with their own practices.

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For major holidays and special occasions, the apartment becomes a gathering place for the entire extended family. Using sliding/swing doors, operable louvers, and custom furniture, select areas within the open floorplate, are compartmentalized into private sleeping quarters. The breakfast dining space converts into a sleeping nook through sliding pocket doors and pull-out bench with fold-down cushions. The penthouse library, normally with just a powder room and wet bar, becomes a guest suite when the sunken seating transforms into a sleeping platform and a shower stall is revealed, normally hidden behind a double hinged door. At the center of the living area is the louvered stair which facilitates the transformation of the space into another sleeping suite. Half of the louvers shift to seal off the stair and the library above, while the pocket doors and swing doors fold out to isolate the space from other areas of the house. The custom designed office desk / murphy bed completes the transformation.

Design and construction occurred mostly during the pandemic with various constraints and challenges. Design strategies explored here may house ideas on how we may adapt existing apartments to be truly sustainable and adaptable to change, both anticipated (aging, family size, etc.) and unpredicted (pandemic, financial, etc.).