tinylong chelsea 2br

A family of four with one closet designed in 1809 and the other not really designed at all asked me to help them get their underwear out of the dining room.

When I entered the apartment of these two mild-mannered writers, I didn't understand why they’d contacted me.  Their charming rental apartment looked at first glance like a featured home on Airbnb.  West coast serene cool, perfect flow, everything in its place, no wads, no piles, no tangles, no ugly furniture, no stupid lamps, no tchotchkes, no 5' x 8' rugs - no problems.  Their dining/study area was styled perfectly.  Below is a tour of my first walkthrough:

I thought they were deranged.

Then, they showed me their bedroom.

Their platform bed was pushed out from the window wall by a headboard/shelf with a folded up area rug behind it.  The bedframe was eating up extremely precious inches of floorspace.

Distance between the foot of the bed and the existing closet: less than 11". 

before

before

Almost nothing in the closet was accessible. Hubs’ clothes were all out in the bureau in the dining room.

I knew we had to tear it out and start from scratch. 

  First we had to deal with the bed.  They needed a storage bed no wider or longer than the mattress itself.

I showed them a 2K option from ABC that I knew I could find secondhand for $750.  Eventually. They preferred I find it for no more than $200.

It didn’t take long for me to find.  I'd now doubled the amount of space available for standing in front of the closet. 

after

My bachelor pad client was tired of his rug so I passed it to these folks to cover the gap in the FLOR tiles. Like, that day, before they came home from Mexico. Because who wants to come home from Mexico to a cramped NYC apartment with a gap in her FLOR tiles? No one.

We ripped out the old closet and installed the new one in a day. Scandi modern, Baltic birch with a trapdoor to access the light switch.