Design Awards Highlights – Part 5

September 17, 2012

In anticipation of the 2012 Design Awards announcement later today, below is one more of last years AIA-NJ Design Award winners – Minervini Vandermark Architecture for Hoboken row house.

Minervini Vandermark Architecture Receives AIA-NJ Design Award For Its Hoboken, N.J. Row House Renovation 

AIA-NJ has awarded the project with a Merit award in the “Residential Built” category of its annual Design Day Competition.

The award was given to Minervini and Vandermark for its renovation of a late 19^th Century row house, located at 33 Willow Terrace in Hoboken, N.J., which is owned by one of the firm’s principals, Anthony Vandermark.

“Congratulation to Minervini and Vandermark on this great project,” said Laurence E. Parisi, AIA-NJ president. “This house is great example of how to effectively utilize the limited space in an urban area. This project, which was so carefully designed, should be used as a model for urban design in New Jersey and the country.”

The house sits within a small row house community of approximately 100 homes that is located in the heart of Hoboken, N.J. The community is called Willow Terrace and was built by Hoboken’s founding family, the Stevens family, between 1880 and 1890, for construction workers at their Hoboken Land and Improvement Co.

“As time passed, the row houses morphed into an eclectic mix of single-family homes, each of which assumed its own distinct style through disjointed additions and alterations,” Vandermark said. “Part of the story I tried to tell in designing this house was the progress of architecture through the years on the terrace and how it isn’t just one thing.”

The original building on the property was structurally unsound and had to be dismantled to its foundation, which created a blank canvas to explore a modern interpretation of the Terrace row house, he added.

The exterior of the house is expressed as two distinct elements — an anchoring 1-story brick base, reminiscent of the historical context of the terrace, and an expressive 2-story cedar box that seemingly floats weightlessly above it. Valuable interior space is reclaimed from the street though the clever use of high-level bay projections that ‘pop’ out at staggered locations from the façade.

The 3-story house, which took 18 months and $300,000 to build and was built on a 13-foot (wide) –by-50-foot (deep) lot, is 1,650 square feet and has three bedrooms, two-and-one-half bathrooms, a living room, kitchen, dining area, two decks and a garage. The floors are radiant concrete.

“It took a thoughtful design solution to build on such a small lot and we were fortunate to receive multiple AIA awards,” said Vandermark.

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