New York homes interiors: three fixed types of plan

This city has three interiors. They share almost nothing but the party wall. The stacked house, the classic apartment and the loft each answered the same narrow lot differently. Each has its own logic, failures and way of being altered.

Most confusion about city interiors comes from applying one type's rules to another. This page sets out the three, what each was for, and what a refit does to it.

The plan types here are architectural categories, not room-by-room accounts of specific residences. Named celebrity homes offer reference points for the stacked house, classic apartment and loft, while an individual property's plan may differ.

Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick's Greenwich Village townhouse is a townhouse reference point; John Lennon's former home in the Dakota is an apartment reference point; and Taylor Swift's former Tribeca loft at 155 Franklin Street is a loft reference point. These examples connect the three plan types to the city's celebrity-home and real-estate landscape without claiming that every interior follows the same plan.

For readers of Mansion Home Tours, the three types are a way to read celebrity homes and real estate tours. A New York townhouse, prewar apartment, or loft in a listing is not just a style. Its type explains the plan, the light, the privacy, and what a renovation cost.

The same fixed points that limit a refit also shape what a buyer or viewer sees. Use them when a tour or listing shows a New York interior, and judge the changes against the building's original logic. The type is part of the property story.

What to take away

The stacked house

A narrow deep house with a raised entrance has floors stacked in sequence, each with a job. The raised principal floor held the company rooms, often two connected front and back by wide doors. They could become one long room or two.

The floor below, at or just under street level, held the kitchen and service rooms, with its own entrance beneath the stoop. Floors above held bedrooms, with ceiling heights decreasing as they rose.

The interior devices center on 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.

Back rooms look onto a yard, 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. 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. From an entrance gallery, the public rooms open: a living room and a dining room. These are often on the street side or the side with the best exposure.

A corridor leads to the bedrooms at the far end, each with its own door.

There is also 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 an elevator replacing the stair. Its logic is separation: public from private, both from service.

Light comes from whichever sides of the building the unit occupies. So the corner unit and the two-exposure unit differ in kind, as noted 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 corridor and open everything. That is where the classic apartment fails.

The gallery made the plan work. The corridor gave each bedroom a door. Remove both and you get a single space with bedrooms hanging off it: the loft's plan imposed on a building not built for it.

The loft

A floor 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, but its problem is the dark middle, deeper here than in any house.

The loft's plan is honest about that. Bedrooms and living space take the perimeter. The center holds kitchen, bathrooms, and storage, which need no window.

The whole stays as open as the occupant can bear. Subdividing a deep plate produces dark rooms. Structure remains visible; columns and ceiling are the interior.

What a refit does: it adds rooms. Each new room must sit against the perimeter for a window, eating the light the loft was chosen for.

A good loft refit keeps rooms to a minimum, uses partial-height or glazed partitions, and accepts the center as service space. Columns carry the load and walls carry nothing; that freedom makes this possible and 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.

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; the floor is the loudest. Neighbors beside you are heard less than neighbors above and below.

In a stacked house, occupants of one floor hear 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. Any serious upgrade deals with the shaft before the windows.

Sealing a building tightly enough for that to work turns ventilation into a designed system rather than a byproduct; the reasoning is set out in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's 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

When a building's interior and exterior are both designated, the designation report describes the interior room by room as architecture. This site follows that model.

The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission publishes its designation reports, 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 these interiors is covered in New York homes prices.