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With CCS, Reed eliminated those and added a wealth of new materials. “I knew that
the owner wanted to live in a space that did not feel plastic,” she explains.
So the building now has distinctive charred-cedar shou-suji-ban Japanese-style matte-black siding, with stainless-steel edging around the Fleetwood aluminum windows.
A tall, skinny entry porch is lined with bright back-painted red Oikos glass. A new
8-foot-high steel front door with electronic hardware pivots opens to reveal a well-lit
foyer that is designed as an art gallery; currently, a Matthew Palladino cast-plaster work
called “Still Life With Fruit” is showcased there; on the second floor, under the staircase,
a found-wood-and-metal piece by Kirk Stoller incorporates old bike handlebars.
“Cass’ design team also widened and flared out the bottom of the stairs to make them
feel grander,” Reed says, pointing to cutaway walls made of painted medium-density-fiberboard (MDF) and above them, new three-quarter-inch-thick glass that replaced
floriated metal railings. Existing flat steel handrails, stripped of paint, are left bare.
“Victorians took stairs seriously and so did we,” Smith says. “We made a showy steel
staircase encased in bleached Douglas fir treads and risers by First Last & Always.”
Wood cladding also reappears in the top section of the stairwell’s north parti-wall.
