207 East 31st Street

207 East 31st Street is seventeen feet wide and fifty feet deep on a lot the city records as Block 912, Lot 6, built in 1901 on a Kips Bay side street that filled in with row housing through the second half of the nineteenth century. The city still classes it S1, a one family house carrying a second legal unit, which is what the English basement and its own door onto the street amount to. It has never been inside a historic district, and it has never been cut up into apartments.

What the house is really about is the stair. The front door and the stair behind it were both cut from old growth South American mahogany milled roughly fifty years ago, and the stair runs the full height of the house under a skylight that drops daylight down the middle of a seventeen foot plan. In a house this narrow that shaft of light is the architecture.

The parlor floor is one continuous room: a living room with a fireplace at the front, a dining area behind it, and a kitchen in maple cabinetry and granite with Viking and Bosch appliances at the back, opening onto a planted courtyard that pulls light and colour into the middle of the floor.

The middle floor is the quiet one: two bedrooms off the stair, and a bath cut for a steam shower. Above it the primary takes the whole plate, with a fireplace of its own, a walk in closet, and a five piece bath in Fantini fixtures.

Below the parlor, the English basement has its own street entrance, a media room, the third of the three fireplaces, a powder room, a serving pantry and full size laundry. Under that, a dry cellar holds a workshop, storage and the mechanicals: a boiler and two hot water heaters, with a Unico high velocity system running from two air handlers and rooftop condensers.

East 31st Street between Second and Third is a quiet tree lined block, and the house sits mid block on the north side. Gramercy Park, Madison Square Park and Murray Hill are all within a few blocks, and the everyday infrastructure of the neighbourhood, the coffee shops and the small restaurants, H and H Bagels, Fairway, Whole Foods and a Trader Joe's around the corner, is close enough to walk to without planning around.