22 Fort Greene Place

In 2002, Fort Greene Place got its one modernist. Metal artist Darcy Miro, RISD trained, with work in the collections of the Museum of Arts and Design and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, had collaborated with Tod Williams and Billie Tsien on the celebrated bronze facade of the American Folk Art Museum, a facade that has since entered MoMA's collection. When she needed an architect of her own, it was Williams and Tsien who made the introduction: Martin Finio, who had founded Christoff:Finio Architecture with Taryn Christoff in 1999.

The site was an abandoned, weedy lot, twenty feet wide and eighty deep, on a block of nineteenth-century Italianate brownstones. Miro and her husband bought it and built from the ground up, and Dwell later told the whole story under the title A House Grows in Brooklyn. City records trace the rest of the arc: a 2016 filing for a renovation and a one-story vertical enlargement, which is how a house born as an artist's experiment grew into its current form, three stories reading as five distinct levels of living, capped by a roof deck.

The plan is organized like a loft that happens to be a townhouse. Kitchen and dining sit on the second floor beside a high-ceilinged living room, with a loft-like reading room perched above and overlooking it. The bedrooms, six in all across 3,700 square feet, stack on the levels above.

The material language is deliberately raw, and it has aged into the house's signature. Exposed walls of the neighboring buildings run through the interior, the railings are commercial metal, conduit is left visible, and the floors move between concrete and wood plank. For a tenant, that restraint is the point: this is architecture meant to be inhabited, not decorated over.

The lowest level was conceived as a working floor, a jewelry workshop and a recording studio rather than the usual basement afterthought. The Design Edit found Miro still making her metalwork down there years after the house was finished. That makes this a genuine rarity on the rental market: a purpose-built maker's level under a single-family house, ready for whatever discipline moves in next.

Fort Greene Place is a short street of Italianate brownstones half a block from Fort Greene Park, and this house is its one interruption, brick and metal holding its own in a row of nineteenth-century stoops. That contrast was the whole idea in 2002, and it still reads from the sidewalk. For a tenant who wants Brooklyn's most architectural park neighborhood, this is a house with an actual design bibliography, and the park at the end of the block.

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