How Young Projects Gave This Manhattan Loft a Cottage Sensibility
The Brooklyn firm transformed a quintessential industrial loft with sweeping walnut millwork, handcrafted details, and spaces tailored for a young family’s growing collection
Downtown Manhattan’s historic lofts possess an unmistakable grandeur, with cast-iron columns, soaring ceilings, oversize windows, and decades of industrial history etched into their bones. So when an entrepreneurial couple enlisted Young Projects to transform their newly acquired three-bedroom loft into a cozy refuge for their growing family, the project immediately charted an unexpected course. One of the first things they mentioned was a “granny sensibility,” recalls founding principal Bryan Young. The brief mentioned the tranquil comforts of an English cottage: botanical motifs, heirloom references, handcrafted details, and inviting places to gather. “They wanted something warm,” he says, “but not too traditional or modern.”
The commission dovetailed neatly with Young’s longstanding fascination with reinterpreting familiar architectural traditions through experimental craftsmanship. Since founding his Brooklyn practice in 2010, he has built an impressive portfolio that reveals how material research can reshape familiar interior elements. For a previous apartment in Tribeca, he recast crown molding as an undulating hand-pulled plaster volume that envelops the unit’s central core. Here, that enduring curiosity found expression in a sweeping gesture of bleached walnut millwork, selected for its richness of grain without the visual weight of its dark brown tone.
“We use it as a way to hold the apartment,” Young explains of the intervention they devised, which partially encircles the open-plan living room, dining area, and kitchen while lending cohesion to its cavernous proportions and serving a variety of practical purposes. It begins as a built-in banquette for a corner café nook that now hosts everything from morning coffee to virtual meetings. Above it, the family’s growing art collection hangs salon-style before the millwork transitions into a compact library that displays a trove of antiquarian books and exuberant ceramics. The gesture culminates in the kitchen’s upper cabinetry, while walnut-faced doors to the primary suite and powder room practically disappear into the composition.
The millwork features rounded edges that accommodate the couple’s plans to grow their family with an energetic dog underfoot. Softened geometries recur throughout, from a curved walnut recess carved into the blue quartzite kitchen island to the two conjoined Arflex sofas anchoring the living area, their nubby bouclé upholstery recalling “a grandmother’s sweater,” as interior design lead Barbara Reyes puts it. Their modularity allows them to shift with ease, whether framing the breakfast nook, facing the television, or separating into a standalone daybed. Nearby, vintage chairs upholstered in Dedar’s tapestry-like Schwarzwald linen surround a pill-shaped table, while a ceramic chandelier by Ben & Aja Blanc sprouts overhead like a cluster of woodland mushrooms.
Nowhere do the curves reach their fullest expression than in the entryway arch. Rendered in mold-cast scagliola, an ancient Italian plaster technique long used to imitate costly marble in historic church restorations, it represents the culmination of years of experimentation for Young Projects. “After seeing that scagliola was robust and durable, we were compelled to bring it to the scale of architecture,” Young says, pointing to his earlier studies that yielded small-scale sculptural objects and furniture prototypes. Though the material convincingly resembles stone, scagliola rarely appears in architectural applications—but the clients readily embraced the opportunity to incorporate the studio’s material research into their home.
Yet the couple didn’t shy away from the loft’s historic character. “We wanted to celebrate the columns versus painting them white and making them disappear,” says Reyes, who finished them in a cool slate blue that highlights their sculptural presence while speaking to the kitchen’s industrial sheen. There, stainless steel wraps the counter and conceals the appliances behind flush push-to-open panels. “The clients like classic, but were open to little hits where appropriate,” she says.
To that end, botanical motifs befitting a country cottage enliven the primary bedroom, whose Roman shades wear an ornate House of Hackney jacquard, before carrying into the future nursery, whose floral Calico Wallpaper mural envelops the room in verdant color. The living room’s art wall even centers on a vibrant Sean Kratzert painting reminiscent of Monet’s Water Lilies, accompanied by punchier works by Frank Magnotta, Lisa Wright, and Sarah Becker. “The pieces are meant to be interchangeable,” Reyes explains, noting the arrangement can evolve alongside the couple’s growing collection. “This type of execution allows for that flexibility.”
Young Projects ultimately resolved the couple’s seemingly contradictory brief with remarkable assurance. “There’s a potpourri of sensibilities at play, but there’s an interesting layering to it, and nothing feels out of place,” Young says. The loft never loses sight of its industrial origins, yet every intervention makes room for family life, a growing collection, and the years ahead.