Landmark Committee

We are looking to buy an apartment in a Landmarked neighborhood. The apartment comes with undeveloped air rights in a brownstone building. Currently, the existing homeowners have an approved building permit to build out over the roof area. Their air rights allow for them to also build up one more floor (though this isn’t approved in their existing permit as it wasn’t in their plan to also build up).  Our renovation plan would be to build out (similar to their plan), but also build up one floor adding a bonus room, then putting a private roof deck on top of that space. Our concern is the potential issues that could arise from having to pull their existing building permit, and resubmitting for a permit for our plan to go out AND up since it’ll now have to go before the Landmark committee? We would keep with the asthetics of the building and neighborhood (eg – brick facade, moulding, etc.), but we’re unsure of how difficult the committee could be. We wanted to see if anyone has had any experience with something similar. Any help or pointers would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

areved

in Architecture 12 years and 11 months ago

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m926bk | 12 years and 11 months ago

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Generally, the Landmarks Preservation Comission will only allow additions that are not visible from the street.  Beyond what you list as the aesthetics of the building and neighborhood (brick, molding, etc.) is the scale of the neighborhood, which the LPC protects and which a non-visible addition maintains.  You’ll likely have to set back the addtion and show with sight-line diagrams that your addition isn’t visible from the street.  You can find guidelines for rooftop additions on the LPC website.