The feeling of the home is an oasis, the materials here are
not things you encounter in the steel and concrete of the city.
I'm Aaron Schiller the founder of Schiller Projects and I'm Colin Clealand partner in
studio director at Schiller projects this is Brooklyn Mass Timber and also my family home.
We are in Clinton Hill Brooklyn,
three blocks from Fort Greene Park, 10 minutes from downtown Manhattan.
I'm Anna Schiller, I'm Annabelle Schiller and this is our home in Brooklyn, New York.
Well Aaron and I were living in lower Manhattan by Canal Street and we were thinking about starting a
family and the idea of pushing a stroller down Canal Street was not my idea of a good time.
So we started looking for a place, really an oasis out of the city but also easy access to New York.
The state of the property was pretty decrepit, when we first came upon
it a hoarder had been living here for several decades, it was a mechanic shop.
When we came in to investigate we had to crawl over lots of hoarders packed goods,
at one point, we found ourselves crawling over a series of stacked pianos. Which if it hadn't been
completely disgusting, would have been quite impressive as a physical feat of hoarding.
So we went looking for a type of building where we could integrate
a new use and build with low carbon technologies, wood, heavy timber.
To do that we needed a strong building that could take the weight of all the wood
we were going to introduce to add floors and new structure to these older buildings. As a result,
this is the first, mass timber, single family residence in New York City.
As you enter in from the street you get a view all the way through the building to the
backyard and as you enter into the space there's a three-story wood stair with a garden at its foot.
And the kitchen is laid out directly in front of you,
the ground floor is the hosting and entertaining center of the home.
As you ascend the stairs you come up to two bedrooms, a laundry room,
a bathroom and, a living room looking out on the cathedral.
As you continue your journey now up, through to the roof, you're in the main suite.
In the rear overlooking the garden is a large shower and bathroom open onto the
closet and the front part of the bedroom is a sunken seating area
where you can sit and read with views of the garden and the rooftop terrace.
When we started this project we knew we wanted to make an example
of what you could do with timber in the city.
We also saw an opportunity to address aspects of the housing crisis we're
experiencing domestically, these types of timber solutions offer
quicker ways to deliver a larger scale of projects to the market.
Building with timber allowed us to take 6 months of framing and compress it to 7 days,
in fact 5 days, we used the extra two to install the stair which was also pre-fabricated timber.
Additionally in working with timber we were able to work with simple components, joints and screws,
that can come undone, so the house is designed to be disassembled with zero waste.
Another aspect of sustainability we pursued was passive house principles
and that relates mostly to how we designed the facades and the roof
to basically create what's called a tight thermal envelope, or imagine just a large
wrapper that goes around the building that makes controlling air flow a lot easier.
Every client brief is a study of family, so when we're doing these single family projects,
we really do have to understand the family and Fisher & Paykel worked with us in a
myriad of different ways to deliver a curated approach that allowed for
integration and malleability that made it ours and also made it the clients.
The kitchen is the main focal point of the space,
we wanted a place that was full of light, that had a lot of gathering spaces for us
and the kids and then in the evenings when we decide to host or have friends and family it's
a wonderful gathering and hosting space and it sort of flows into the outdoor areas as well.
The kitchen functions in two main zones on one side you have the principal units,
so we have the refrigerator, the freezer, the oven and the cook top.
And on the other side you have the combination steam oven and the cool drawer.
The cool drawer unit is an example of looking for design freedom and
finding the right fit that allows us to creatively design the home,
the cool drawer unit in this home for instance is on the family side of the
kitchen not the chef side of the kitchen so it really balances the flow of the building.
As a standard in our office, devoid of it being a personal project or not,
we do hold our vendors to a very high standard and we vet them thoroughly and we felt that the
team at Fisher & Paykel met that standard from a sustainability level, from a sourcing level,
from a customer service level, obviously from a product level.
We're trying to introduce products to our clients that they can benefit from for years to come.
All of our work really focuses on connecting to context, to place, in New York when you
connect a building to the exterior it can make you feel more busy, more tired.
So we had to find ways to bring in light, air and calmness and make the house a refuge and
we did that with the great windows and skylights that we built ourselves during
covid and installed in the house so that it has a almost zen-like calmness to it.
And we organised all the openings in the building around those key principles.
Allowing daylight to come in wherever you were in the space that's why we
introduced this beautiful structural skylight that same light source filters
through the staircase acting like a lantern and bathing the Japanese Maple at the base.
My favorite detail is when we're doing our job as Architects to storytelling, and telling the
story of the integration of an existing old brick building and a new technology such as mass timber.
And then for me my favorite place is the sunken lounge, when you sit down in it the
city disappears, the garden comes forward and the cathedral encompasses your entire view.