Attractive Partition to Separate Duplex from Top floor
We have a two family brownstone in Stuyvesant Hts. The top floor is a rental. We have the parlor floor/garden floor duplex. For both privacy and security reasons, we are thinking of building a partition to separate our space from the tenants’ (among other things, our bath is across the hall from our other rooms,…
We have a two family brownstone in Stuyvesant Hts. The top floor is a rental. We have the parlor floor/garden floor duplex.
For both privacy and security reasons, we are thinking of building a partition to separate our space from the tenants’
(among other things, our bath is across the hall from our other rooms, so we have to peek out of the bedroom if we’ve just taken a bath. It feels like a dorm or the YMCA!
The house has lovely details, and whatever we put in shoudn’t just be functional (i.e. throwing up a plain sheetrock wall), but rather look like it goes with the house somehow. Also – we would like it to be ultimately remvable, in case we decide to inhabit the whole house someday. Any idea who I’d speak to about designing/building such a thing? Surely this has been done before? Thanks!
OP here. Ideally, I’d also like to put the tenant on the first floor – but the renovations involved in that are not affordable.
So – we will occuy the garden and parlor floors, and the tenant will be on the top floor. I still would like to find a good way to do this. The architect we’re using for our kitchen renovation had the sense that this would be a very expensive thing to design/build, if it were to a) give us privacy, b) give us security, and c) be attractive. He quoted 10K for this partition!
I need some new ideas!
We have a similar issue: We live on the first 2 floors and rent out the 3rd/top floor. There is only one main staircase. The only thing to do would be:
1) live on the top 2 floors and leave the tenant on the first floor. Build a wall/door so that the tenant could not go any further up the stairs to the 2nd floor without a key… Trouble is, I think that the “wall” would look so out of place.
2) it’s not a HUGE house, and we like the foyer and main front hallway as it is, not ‘chopped up’. We also want to be able to look out into the yard from our 1st floor kitchen and step easily out to it…so the other option we are looking at is to install a small spiral staircase inside the first floor middle room to connect us to the 2nd floor where our bedrooms and office will be.
There’s been some negative sentiments about installing the spiral stairs int an old houwon this blog, but, we think that modern living calls for a way of accessing ones’ bedrooms – the spiral staircase will be pretty much for us, maybe children friends to go play in our children’s rooms, but otherwise, we’d be the only onese using the spirals – not guests. The main staircase can always be used to carry up/down the big things, like furniture, etc.
If anyone knows someone who does excellent work installing spiral staircases, please don’t keep it a secret and reply here!
Thanks,
your on decatur?
Actually, we just recently took down the plain sheetrock wall that was separating our downstairs duplex from the upstairs rental. We took it down because we wanted to move into the entire house, but while it was up, it didn’t look troublesome at all. It simply looked like part of the house, even though the rest of house has a great amount of detail in it. But I imagine you could probably put some molding on the wall if you wanted it to look more period (not talking out of experience, just conjecture).