53 Horatio Street #TH1

Horatio Street still has its Belgian block. On the stretch between Hudson and Greenwich the cars slow and the city quiets, and a row of brick houses from the 1840s holds the line behind their stoops. Residence TH1 lives inside one of them, an 1848 Federal house divided long ago into four apartments, and it kept the part a townhouse leaves behind: four floors of its own, behind a black door, hidden in plain sight.

The block was landmarked into the Greenwich Village Historic District, which is why the row still reads the way it did when the houses were new. What sets this one apart is what survived the conversions, one to a floor: four wood-burning fireplaces.

You come in on the parlor level, where the ceilings run ten feet and the first fireplace is already laid. The living and dining rooms open into one another under the original proportions, and the light arrives from the south and finds the far wall.

A flight down, the garden level does the daily work: an eat-in kitchen in marble, with Sub-Zero, Viking, and Miele, and a breakfast room beside it. A stair climbs through the middle of the house and keeps going.

Each of the two south-facing bedroom suites takes a floor of its own, with its own fireplace, its own bath, and a wall of closets. Exposed brick runs where the renovation let it, and the heat and cooling are zoned floor by floor, so the house can be four quiet worlds or one.

This is the low, leafy end of the West Village, where the row houses keep their scale and the trees lean over the street. The waterfront is a few minutes one way, the restaurants of Hudson and Greenwich a few minutes the other, and the house sits in the middle of it, behind its own door, on a block that has kept its nineteenth-century hush.