A Skinny Brooklyn Townhouse Stacks Spaces for Living, Working, and Entertaining
Photo by Mohamed Sadek
Red Hook is "the farthest you can get from New York while still being in New York," quips Anna Clark of the once-industrial waterfront area of Brooklyn. The village-like neighborhood’s sense of remove from the wider city and opportunities for live/work space were part of the appeal when Anna, an artist/book publisher/radio host, and her partner, designer and musician Thanhyen Nguyen, bought a three-story townhouse there in 2019.
Located just a few blocks from where the couple had been renting, the 1,862-square-foot space is one of five that incorporate elements of a large early-20th-century carriage house. When they found it, the double-height ground floor and increasingly compact living spaces upstairs—with setbacks that create a series of terraces—offered an ideal floor plan. "We liked to call it the layer cake house because it reminded us of boxes stacked on boxes," Thanh says. "The farther up you went into the house, the smaller the boxes became."
