every nest starts with a simple twig…
Owning your own Townhouse can be a wonderful experience. It can also turn into a nightmare if you have the attitude that it will take care of itself. Knowing the trouble signs can save you from that frustration, help secure your greatest investment and give you the pleasure of living that you deserve. Here’s Five Things about Townhouses you should know.
We (SimpleTwig Architecture.llc) will show you the character, layout and thinking behind several different rental apartments (this is the second of several articles)
A followup on the Apartment Themes is our Bathroom Themes, together and combined in different ways creates an apartment building, condo or co-op that provides each tenant with a special and unique place they can call home.
Continue reading “New Residential Development in Brooklyn – BATHROOM THEMES”
A rather special apartment building design by SimpleTwig Architecture.llc, the concept focuses on making the most of the apartment quality, from the moment one steps off the elevator to the moment one sits down on their sofa, the design seeks to maximize living space while minimizing other spaces without compromising quality living.
This article explores the basic layout of the entire apartment floor plan level, which will be supplemented by images of the actual units tomorrow, since we have so much to share on this project. This article also corresponds to two additional articles, one on the parking facilities, and the other on the retail, garden and street level planning of the project. All together, this is how one should make a fully integrated project that makes the most of tenant spaces, provides the community with a special building and provides the owner with a building that is easy to build, maintain and sustain.
Continue reading “New Residential Development in Brooklyn – RESIDENTIAL COMPONENT”
This version is for the smaller walkup building of 25’x60′ in order to fit the programmatic components comfortably. It provides a way for a developer to accommodate more people within a building footprint and thus increase the yearly income.
The concept is simple, take what would normally be a three bedroom apartment and change it to 4 shared living suites where individuals get their own private suite, complete with a private bathroom, bedroom and living space, and then share only the kitchen and other building amenities. For a 5 story walkup, the potential is for 19 ‘bedroom suites’ versus the conventional 5-3 bedroom apartments. It is simple math from this point to understand that the suites are occupied with working adults while 2/3’s of the bedrooms from a standard apartment are occupied by children, or, that home office.
Continue reading “The Ultimate Shared Living Suites – FOR DEVELOPERS”
SHARED APARTMENT LIVING
This layout option is for the Homeowner, who may not be willing to invest in our ultimate walkup shared living layout which has initial higher upfront costs with a higher return over a longer period of time making it more appropriate for the developer. This version is more of a straight forward apartment with shared bathroom, kitchen and living rooms with more modest sized suites, the ultimate version to be released soon has individual suites with their own bathrooms and only a shared kitchen, the living areas are within each suite.
Continue reading “Shared Living Suites – Semi-Apartments within an Apartment”
The design challenge is to maximize the square footage within a typical 20’x45′ townhouse footprint while minimizing the lost space in public areas. Sounds simple? Haha, yeah sure. To do so one needs to examine all the pieces to ensure they themselves are efficient, and then arrange those pieces in such a way to avoid wasted space and improve sizes of rooms based on their hierarchical importance.
So we want to minimize the public spaces, the hallways and push that area savings into the main rooms of the apartment. At the same time we want to maximize the number of bedrooms, keep all plumbing and vent stacks in one area to minimize cost of construction, and keep everything nice and easy to build with simply arranged partitions, so the cost stays reasonable, and the time it takes to finish is quick. Clean layouts means less confusion for contractors, thus avoiding mistakes.
Can we at SimpleTwig Architecture.llc do it? We think we have and would like to present a clean, highly efficient apartment layout ready for most townhouses in New York City, Chicago and other urban areas, allowing the Home Owner to maximize their rent roll while providing their tenants with homes they will look forward to living in.
This is a very cut and dry analysis of four different stair configurations that could help generate an additional $54,000 in rental income from a 4 story townhouse type structure just by reconfiguring the stair, touched on in a previous article (which we would recommend reading). The first option is the traditional townhouse stair, found in most townhouses in New York City. Often this stair offers stunning architectural detail and should be preserved, but more often than not the original stair has been replaced with a metal stair, due to sagging or some other issue. Sadly the replacements lack character and often do not fix the underlying issue to why they were sagging and are themselves sagging, causing stress fractures in party-walls at each end of the stair.
The advantages of replacing the stair are simple, it frees up square footage that can be used inside an apartment. The following compares three different stairs, the traditional, the compact and the ‘extended landing’, and a new comer, the squarish stair which is the best option (< spoiler alert). It is noted as ‘Stair 8’ which reflects the number of versions we’ve studied to get to that point. This ‘best option 8’ is shown in the article ‘The Ultimate Townhouse Floor Plan’ released August 28, 2017, so take a look at that one as well.
Continue reading “Analysis of Residential Stair Configurations for Townhouses”
You may know something isn’t quite right about your house or room, but don’t know exactly what to do to make it better. Running out of space, things look cluttered, just need a gathering space for family that is informal and inviting? This is where SimpleTwig Architecture steps in.
Exterior Atrium: Besides the banners, each wire figure surrounding the auditorium takes on the shape of a traditional bread stove…
Continue reading “[architecture] Afghan Cultural Centre 13/24”