Cotton Residence & Studio

This 3000 square foot space in one of the last fully artist-occupied buildings left in Tribeca, was acquired as a fully renovated post-modern architectural statement, complete with a shifted grid of interior partitions and a radial dropped ceiling motif.  Our clients, a painter and a gallerist, sought to remove all remnants of twentieth century rehabilitation, exposing the original structural elements of the 120 year old building. This excavative process would reveal layers of lime mineral calcification on the brick walls from the building's original function as a refrigerated storage facility, which would ultimately inform our investigations into texture and finish palettes for the project.  The results, based on the artists own working palette and studies of the space's natural light colour temperature at various times of day, manifested a technique of applying and removing different translucencies of paint solution to produce the white washed brick effect that surrounds the expansive living and working spaces within the loft.  A similar treatment of carefully measured application and subtraction of hand finish was adopted to the original flat-sawn white oak floor and applied respectively to a new rift-cut white oak herringbone floor in the private spaces of the artist's residence.

The programmatic requirements for a painting and sculpture studio with critical adjacencies to a professional kitchen were developed along with new, fully-concealed HVAC and oil-based painting ventilation systems.