“This project is not necessarily a brilliant Instagram version of the West Village,” says interior designer Jessica Kamel about the town house, which she shares with her husband and three children in the quarter of Manhattan in the city center of Manhattan. “It's about community – our windows are always open – and we wanted the interiors to repeat this.”
For camel, the founder and director of the architecture and interior design company Ronen Lev next to co-founder Christina Akiskalou, the renovation of soup to nuts of a four-story building in 1899 was a deeply personal return. After the couple had lived in the neighborhood a few years after the college, Uptown drew when their first child was born, but the reputation of their beloved corner of the city was finally too difficult to ignore. After the family had moved to a rental apartment on Bleecker Street, Kamel started a comprehensive search for an independent apartment with large bones and character, which, however, still needed the vision and execution for which Ronen Lev is still celebrated. “I knew that what we bought,” she recalls, “I would want to be able to renovate ourselves.”
With the help of a pocket list agent, Kamel finally found a property that ticked all the boxes. Once a restaurant and a grain memory during its 125-year existence, the characteristic address was flooded with natural light from large windows and an opening between floor and garden soils. It still felt open enough on the scale, and its multi -stage layout offered a natural separation between private and public spaces. The previous owner, a photographer, had carried out some minor updates of the property, but only a few were family -oriented. The logical additions included several cupboards and an airy, informal dining area with a lot of soft seating for meals and homework.
The most considerable changes to the house, which is located in the Greenwich Village Historic District, occurred at the garden level, where the team moved the kitchen back from the street and opened it on more light. “We wanted to honor the architecture, but they adapt how a family would live today,” says Kamel. Other structural changes included the expansion of the primary bath in order to create a quiet retreat with a soft bathtub and a large shower, and add a closed office and a created terrace on the roof.