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Part of New york homes: ideas, options and buying details
New york homes interiors: what to know and why
New York homes interiors in three types: the stacked house, the classic apartment and the loft, and the fixed points that a refit can never move.
There are three interiors in this city, and they have almost nothing in common except the party wall. The stacked house, the classic apartment and the loft each began as a different answer to the same narrow lot, and each has its own logic, its own failures and its own way of being altered. Most confusion about city interiors comes from applying the rules of one to another. This page sets out the three, what each was for, and what a refit does to it.
It describes types only. No building, unit or occupant is identified.
What to take away
- The stacked house is a vertical sequence; the classic apartment is a horizontal one; the loft is a single volume. Each demands a different plan.
- In all three, the elements that cannot move, the stair, the stack, the flue and the windows, decide what a refit can do.
- The most common failure is importing the open plan into an interior that was built around closed rooms and a corridor.
The stacked house
A narrow deep house with a raised entrance is a sequence of floors, each with a job. The raised principal floor held the rooms for company, often two connected front and back with wide doors between them, so that they could be one long room or two. The floor below, at or just under street level, held the kitchen and the service rooms, with its own entrance beneath the stoop. The floors above held bedrooms, decreasing in ceiling height as they rose.
The interior devices are all about the two ends and the dark middle. The stair rises in the center or along one side, lit from above where the plan allowed a skylight over the well. The back rooms look onto a yard, the front rooms onto the street, and the middle holds closets, bathrooms and the stair. The connected principal rooms, opened together, were the house's answer to having no room wider than the lot.
What a refit does. The kitchen moves up from the service floor to the principal floor, usually to the back, and the service floor becomes a separate unit or a family room. The wide doors between the connected rooms come out, or are fixed open. The top floor, once the lowest and least, becomes the private floor because it is furthest from the street. Every one of those moves is constrained by the stair, which cannot move, and the stack, which runs vertically through the building and decides where the wet rooms can be. The elements that survive all of this, and what they tell you, are the subject of New York homes list.
The classic apartment
The apartment planned as a full-floor or half-floor home in a purpose-built building is a horizontal version of the same hierarchy. There is an entrance gallery, from which the public rooms open: a living room and a dining room, often on the street side or the side with the best exposure. There is a corridor leading to the bedrooms, each with its own door, at the far end. And there is a service side: kitchen, pantry, and rooms that were once for staff, reached by a second corridor or a service entrance.
The plan gave a household everything a stacked house gave, on one level, with the stair replaced by an elevator. Its logic is separation: public from private, both from service. Its light comes from whichever sides of the building the unit occupies, which is why the corner unit and the unit with two exposures are different in kind, a point made in New York homes.
What a refit does. The service rooms are absorbed into the kitchen, which grows and opens toward the dining room. Bedrooms are combined or gain bathrooms. The temptation is to remove the gallery and the corridor and open everything, and this is where the classic apartment fails: the gallery was the room that made the plan work, and the corridor was what gave each bedroom a door. Take them out and the result is a single space with bedrooms hanging off it, which is the loft's plan imposed on a building that was not designed for it.
The loft
A floor of a building built for manufacture or storage has none of the above. It has a deep plate, columns on a grid, large windows at one or two ends, high ceilings and no rooms at all. Its virtue is volume and light at the perimeter; its problem is the dark middle, which is deeper here than in any house.
The loft's plan is honest about that. The perimeter gets the living space and the bedrooms; the center gets the kitchen, the bathrooms and storage, which need no window; and the whole is kept as open as the occupant can bear, because subdividing a deep plate produces dark rooms. Structure is visible and stays visible; the columns and the ceiling are the interior.
What a refit does. It adds rooms, and every added room has to be placed against the perimeter to have a window, which eats the light the loft was chosen for. The good loft refit keeps rooms to the minimum, uses partial-height or glazed partitions, and accepts that the center is service space. The structural freedom that makes this possible, columns carrying the load and walls carrying nothing, is explained in architecture and interiors.
The fixed points
Across all three, the same elements resist change, and the useful question before any plan is where they are.
| Element | Why it cannot move | What it decides |
|---|---|---|
| The party walls | They carry the building and belong to two properties | Where the windows are not, and therefore where the light is |
| The stair or elevator core | Structure and shared access | The dark middle, and the route through the plan |
| The plumbing stack | Runs vertically through every floor to the drain | Where kitchens and bathrooms can go |
| The flues | Masonry in the party wall, one stack serving stacked fireplaces | Where the thick wall is, and where a fireplace was |
| The window openings | Facade, and often protected | Which rooms can be habitable and how tall they feel |
| The floor structure | Spans between party walls or columns | How wide a room can be without a beam |
A plan that respects these reads as inevitable. A plan that fights them reads as expensive, and it usually was.
Sound, heat and the vertical
Two conditions of the stacked interior are worth stating because they surprise people.
The party wall is the quietest element in the building and the floor is the loudest. Neighbors beside you are heard less than neighbors above and below, and in a stacked house the occupants of one floor hear the occupants of the next through the stair. Soft floors, solid doors and a stair that can be closed off do more for peace than anything done to the walls.
The stair is a chimney. Warm air rises through it and collects at the top, so the lower floors are cold and the upper floors warm, and any serious upgrade deals with the shaft before it deals with the windows. Sealing a building tightly enough for that to work turns ventilation into a designed system rather than a byproduct, and the reasoning behind it is set out in the EPA introduction to indoor air quality. The classic apartment, on one level, escapes this; the loft, with its high ceiling, has the same problem in a single room.
Reading an interior here
- Identify which of the three you are in. The plan, the light and the refit options follow from that alone.
- Find the fixed points: party walls, core, stack, flues, windows. Draw them mentally before looking at anything else.
- Look for the removed rooms. Beams in the ceiling, a cornice that stops, a floor finish changing mid-room.
- Check where the kitchen is against where the stack is. A long distance between them means a plan that fought the building.
- Count the doors. An interior that has kept its doors has kept its privacy; one that has lost them has traded it for light.
Where a building's interior has been designated as well as its exterior, the designation report describes the interior as architecture, room by room, and that is the model this site follows. The city's landmarks commission publishes its designation reports, which are the best public account of how such interiors were planned and finished, written without reference to who lives in them.
Common questions
Which of the three is best to live in?
The one whose logic matches the household. A family that wants doors wants a stacked house or a classic apartment. A household that lives in one room wants a loft. The failures come from wanting a loft's openness inside a classic plan, or a classic plan's privacy inside a loft.
Why is the kitchen so often in an odd place in an old house?
Because it moved. It began on the service floor and was brought up, usually to the back of the principal floor near the stack. Where it sits far from the stack, someone paid to run new drainage, and the ceiling below will show the bulkhead.
Can a loft be given real bedrooms?
Yes, at the perimeter, at the cost of the light those windows gave the main space. The honest loft plan minimizes rooms; the dishonest one produces a corridor of dark cells with a bright room at the end.
How does this compare with a large detached house?
A detached house has four exposures and no party walls, so its problems are distance and volume rather than light and depth. What the large house does with that freedom, and how its three zones are arranged, is set out under mansions. What sale records do and do not say about any of these interiors is covered in New York homes prices.
