New York Loft House

One volume, not a set of rooms

A loft is one space with a lot of height and very few walls to hide behind. Everything is on show — the way the stair meets the floor, the line where the ceiling changes material, the reveal at the bottom of a cabinet run.

The stair is the piece the whole interior is organised around. A floating tread carries its load back into a hidden structure, so the visible timber is the last thing that happens, not the first — it goes on top of steel that was set out long before anyone saw a finish sample.

The kitchen sits inside the volume instead of along a wall, which is what keeps the space reading as one room. The bedroom tucked under the stair, with the plank ceiling carried through, does the same thing from the other end.