23 Cornelia Street

Cornelia Street is one block long, and for most of its life the west side of it was the back of the neighborhood: tenements, a laundry, a stable. Number 23 was the stable. Charles B. Meyers, who would go on to design Bellevue's additions, the Criminal Courts on Foley Square and the main building of Yeshiva University, put it up in 1912 for a man named Joseph Marron: two stories of brick, three bays, a big arched door in the middle for the horses and a smaller one either side. By 1925 it was a laundry. By 1967 it was a photographer's studio with a one-car garage and an apartment upstairs, and it stayed more or less that way for forty years.

The architect's office remembers it as an 1860s carriage house, and the lot certainly is that old. The building on it, by the city's own record, is 1912. Either way, when Galia Solomonoff first walked it, it was a workaday brick box with almost no natural light: 21 feet wide, hemmed in by a six-story tenement on one side and a townhouse on the other, with a three-foot yard at the back.

Solomonoff's answer was to go up. Two stories became four, under a new double-peaked roof (she does not like flat roofs), and the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which had only just brought this block into the Greenwich Village Historic District, made her lower the penthouse and shorten the pergola before approving it in December 2010. Inside, she carved a white staircase through the center of the plan and turned it into a light well, so daylight drops from the roof down through every floor. Under the house, below the water table, the engineers at Simpson Gumpertz and Heger sank a 30-foot pool, which became a second source of light: shimmer and reflection coming back up.

The old perimeter walls of exposed brick stayed. Almost nothing else did. Only the second-floor framing and a corner of the first survived the build, which ran from 2010 to 2014 and took the house from a garage with an apartment over it to roughly 5,500 square feet, with terraces, a roof deck and a drive-in garage where the horses used to come and go.

What surprised Solomonoff when it was done was not the light. It was the quiet. Stepping off Cornelia Street into the house felt, she says, like a time tunnel: still, a little otherworldly. The only sound was the rhythm of someone swimming in the pool, carrying all the way up the staircase. An unexpected kind of intimacy, in her words, for a house on a street that has since had a song written about it. Taylor Swift rented it in 2016.

Galia Solomonoff founded Solomonoff Architecture Studio in 2004, after leading Dia:Beacon at OpenOffice, and teaches at Columbia's GSAPP. This is the first in a series on the architects and designers behind the houses we cover.