Fine Art in Progress

Even though Rebecca Sroge loves her fabulous house, a three-story minimalist “loft” with a historical façade on 14th Street and Seventh Avenue that I’ve many times visited for parties and never wanted to leave, she almost said no when I asked to feature it.

“Dave reminds me we’re under construction (again) with everything covered by fine white dust…” she wrote, referring to her husband, architect David Johnson.

I laughed when I read the note, recalling my tour of the house years earlier.

“You live with an architect,” I said, “Aren’t you always under construction?!”

Of course, she agreed, indeed she was.

As we toured around the cool, spare open plan kitchen/living/dining room on the first floor (I having promised to overlook the dust) Rebecca pointed at the closed door of a bathroom she said they’ll soon be rid of, that will, ideally, be moved to the basement.

“See, living with an architect, you realize the impermanence of a structure,” she said, dramatically gesturing around the curtained- and cut-out space. The affect was compelling, offering a clue as to why Rebecca is a highly skilled marketer, one who currently works in-house for a pharmaceutical company in Chicago.  

“You realize that you can actually manipulate where you live, that you can take a bathroom out in a weekend and put one back up pretty quickly,” she said.

I stared at her open-mouthed, but she waved off my disbelief handily.

“As long as the rough plumbing is done, it’s not that hard.”

Rebecca and David have been D-I-T (Doing It Themselves) along with a cadre of helpful friends and family since they bought the 1887 mostly-detached row-house in 1998 as a three-family.

It has been a lesson in patience, Rebecca explained with a sigh. “Everything takes longer and costs more than you want it to, so the things I want to do – like rip out the back wall to the garden and put in a garage door – I might never be able to afford to do.”

The current hierarchy of projects goes in order, she decided, ticking it off on her fingers: “kids’ room, kitchen, bathroom off the kitchen, metal fence in the front…” The very expensive garage door idea will be tabled until further down the road.

What has been done, though, is a phenomenal nod to both now and then, the history and the future as only a thoughtful architect might be able to pull off. Amongst the brick and beams, stereo components and lights are tucked hither and thither, carefully exposed just enough to look uncluttered but also be convenient. There is nothing unsightly to disturb the artistic eye. 

“I’ve been lucky to have been able to develop this place, to expose the joists and the walls,” said the architect himself before jetting off to the offices of his private firm, Arch Studio, housed conveniently just around the corner at 424 Seventh Avenue. “I like to contrast the old against new slick textures,” David said.

David has had a career full of experience designing old and new spaces and, ideally, mixing the two. He worked with architect Hardy Holzman on such New York City projects as the Dance Theater of Harlem and the late, great Windows on the World as well as high-profile residential clients including Lillian Vernon. He then worked with Beyer Blinder, where he designed the shopping passages for the massive Grand Central renovation project, among others. In recent years, he has brought his modern aesthetic to restaurants and residential projects including the Austrian Cafe Steinhoff across the street, whose modern rusted metalwork doors and window-frames mirror his own. Rebecca calls a home David designed down the way, “our house 4.0, on steroids,” a fully realized vision.

The couple was living in Manhattan when they “got a windfall” and decided to look in Park Slope to parlay their cash into something bigger than the studio or one-bedroom they could afford in the city.

“Real estate agent Harvey Heit took us around Park Slope and we only looked for two weekends before we found this place,” Rebecca remembers. Without much money beyond their down payment, the couple looked for a place they could live in while they gut-renovated it slowly around themselves.  

The place was a wreck, she said, three one-bedroom apartments with little hallways everywhere, painted battleship grey that had been “left to rot by an absentee landlord who lived in California just waiting for the rent-control tenant to die.”

They fell in love, though, with the house’s front facade, a beautiful old terracotta with intricate sunflower carvings. And not being attached was appealing, says Rebecca, a self-proclaimed “apartment baby” who had never not shared walls with others.

It took the couple six months to close for a sum of “less than $400,000” after figuring various violations and how to get rid of the pack of dogs in the basement. Finally, eventhually they moved in, to the second floor.

They immediately started work on the top floor, which for a few years served as guest space and David’s office, then Rebecca’s office and that has just now been gutted anew to create two bedrooms and a living space for their two daughters, who seem to have outgrown the cozy second-floor nook they’ve slept in.

It was in 2001 that the couple started taking over the whole house, ripping everything out during “gutting parties”, putting plumbing in with the help of an uncle in the business and only farming out things like electrical work that required licensed contractors. In went a “temporary” kitchen that has served them ever since as other projects have taken priority. 

“I’ve been promised a real kitchen with real drawers!” Rebecca laments, though laughingly. Functionality aside, it still looks great, modern and clean, a great backdrop for their collection of friends’ and local art, including Rebecca’s own in the entry, a triptych of rusting metal squares she calls “my rip-off of Robert Ryman!”

“I always wanted to live in an art gallery,” she said, “Someday maybe we’ll even have poured cement floors…” 

Meanwhile, though, even without those floors, the gallery aesthetic prevails. The backyard, lined with easy fast-growing bamboo that lasts all winter, features a plastic lime green couch and chair set by Phillipe Starck, picked up cheap as part of what Rebecca calls the couple’s “chic-on-a-shoestring” style. A metal arch overhead, built by David, houses lights and a stereo for parties, and art abounds, including a steel centaur sculpture along the fence and a full-sized naked mannequin, both supplied by friends.

Over the long metal tables pushed against the wall in the dining area is a portrait of David by Park Slope artist Brian Douglas. There is also work by Susan Bowen, a photographer who shares office space with David, and a painting by Jenny Laden looms over a bright cut-out area of the master bedroom, just between Rebecca’s “pride and joy” second floor bathroom, filled with unique David-created metallic touches, and an oversized window outside which Rebecca grows salad greens on the fire escape.

Here and there, like up the wall alongside the old wooden staircase, whose railing and banister will soon be torn out in favor of a metal one, David has cut out what he calls “art boxes” from the drywall, where books or small art works are placed. On the first floor, such boxes hold the stereo and the couple’s CD collection.

The third floor has recently been gutted, and Rebecca offers up hopefully that they’re “making good progress” and as soon as July it could be given over to the girls, and their stuff. Memorial Day weekend was going to include patching walls and putting up drywall, making sure to keep the exposed brick exposed, and then there would then be repainting, finishing floors…slowly but surely taking over the whole house as they’d one day imagined.

Luckily, the family seems to live seamlessly through their many changes.

“The rough edges work for us, which is good because when Dave’s bored he rips down a wall,” Rebecca said.

The last remnants of the old cheap tenement materials are finally, she said, being ripped up.

“Except for the outside, the whole idea is to have all modern materials,” Rebecca said.

Maybe this summer, probably more like the fall.  And who knows what after that. Change is a hallmark of this house.