Carriage House is a minimalist townhouse located in New York, United States, designed by Atelier Frey. The central tension animating Carriage House is temporal rather than spatial. A 1902 CPH Gilbert townhouse on the Upper East Side, originally commissioned by banker and philanthropist Jules Semon Bache, the building had accumulated more than a century of competing renovations – its bones pre-war, its interventions spanning art collectors, a resident doctor, and a series of architects whose accumulated decisions produced something genuinely strange. Designers Brittney Hart and Justin Capuco of Atelier Frey inherited not a coherent historic property but a layered document of taste, each generation’s logic partially obscuring the last.
Their response was clarification rather than erasure. Drawing reference from Italian architects Piero Portaluppi and Osvaldo Borsani – practitioners who understood classicism and modernity not as opposites but as a productive unresolved argument – Atelier Frey pursued the home’s most distilled state rather than any single period’s vision of it. The result reads less as renovation than as strategic archaeology, decisions made by subtraction as much as addition.
The foyer anchors this approach. A sculptural staircase, reconfigured from the 1980s-era disorder, now rises through an atrium flooded by skylight – a move that transforms a 25-foot-wide townhouse into something that registers as genuinely expansive. Volume here is manufactured through control of light and vertical sight lines rather than through raw square footage, a technique with roots in Portaluppi’s Milanese apartment work, where narrow footprints were routinely made to feel palatial through orchestrated sequence.
Throughout the living spaces, a warm material palette anchors the classicist framework – dark-stained walnut paneling, travertine, stone, and woven textiles in sand and ochre. The furniture program draws from European mid-century production: high-backed dining chairs in cognac leather, a substantial dining table with a fluted stone base, curved sofas with the wide upholstered profiles associated with postwar Italian domestic design. Nothing reads as period reconstruction. The references are absorbed into a contemporary register that feels inhabited rather than curated.
