The 1894 brick factory building sits in a bucolic New Jersey landscape, offering what seems to be the ideal living space of the 90s: a loft in the country.
Surrounded by tall trees and overlooking the limpid Delaware and Raritan Canal, where mule-drawn barges once carried goods between New York and Philadelphia, the 3,200-square-foot building in Somerset County, which once housed the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company, has been transformed into a striking yet serene living and working environment for a couple whose lives center on design in its multiple guises.
And it’s all within about 50 miles of Manhattan.
No wonder Alastair Gordon, 43, a freelance writer and curator who specializes in architecture, and Barbara de Vries, 39, a Dutch-born fashion designer and former model, call the building their “dream house.” The project–with its respect for the century-old architecture, its soaring interior spaces and its living and working areas–is a synthesis of modernism today.
Gordon, who grew up on the campus of Princeton University–his father was the dean of the chapel–said that as a teen-ager he often walked the grounds of the dilapidated building while exploring rural areas. “It was a very special, romantic place,” he said, and one day he thought to himself, “When I grow up I’m going to come fix it up and live here.” It was, he said, “a Proustian moment.”
And as things happen in these modern fairy tales, about three years ago, when de Vries was working as design director for CK Calvin Klein, the couple decided it was time to move out of New York City. They took a leisurely drive to Gordon’s childhood haunts. “Sure enough,” Gordon said, there was a sign that the factory, which is about 15 miles from New Brunswick, was available for lease.
Soon Gordon had negotiated a long-term lease and, with de Vries, was tossing design ideas around with two New York architects, Henry Smith-Miller and Laurie Hawkinson.
“Alastair and Barbara live in the same way we think about space: in an open plan,” Hawkinson said. Smith-Miller, who has worked on the idea of inserting one structure into another for most of his 25-year career, said the factory gave him a chance to do one of his favorite things: “Put a seemingly temporary platform inside the space with columns that are not vertical.”
The couple “live on and under it,” he said.
De Vries described the events that led to their move into the factory as the “fates of real estate and life style at work.”
During the construction, the couple lived in a small house nearby, and de Vries commuted to New York for a year. Around the time the factory was ready, she started to design a collection of sportswear in her own name for Onward Kashiyama, a Japanese company. The couple, who met six years ago, moved into the former factory about a year ago.
For de Vries, whose father and stepfather were architects in Amsterdam and who grew up “with models and drawings,” the renovation presented an exciting challenge. “If we got through this, we’re good for a couple of years,” she said, referring to the wear and tear on a relationship that a renovation can provoke. Gordon added, “When we asked our friends Henry and Laurie to help us, it wasn’t this big official thing, but a way to get something done that we would all like.”
The project combined natural and futuristic elements: the sober dark-red brick exterior contrasted with the white walls and open structure of the interior, and the natural pale wood was offset by the industrial cast-aluminum saddles and corner brackets that support the joists of the mezzanine. Gordon calls the ensemble “low high-tech.”
The temporary look of the structure was intentional.
`’That was the fun of it,” Gordon said.
Hawkinson explained that the platform supports slope away from the windows to take advantage of an uninterrupted view of the south-facing windows, and to emphasize the luxuriousness of such a large area, particularly for two tall people. (Gordon is 6-foot-5, de Vries 6-foot-1.)
Keeping the brick exterior intact, the architects suggested an interior structure nine feet high that would provide a mezzanine for the master bedroom, bathroom, a second living room and de Vries’s study, as well as a bold organizing principle. “We didn’t want a quaint 19th-century insertion,” Gordon said.
