Amy Finley Scott descends upon the geometric puzzle that is the New York City apartment -- a place of perhaps 700 or 800 square feet with books and beds, computers and Cuisinarts and a television, and three or four humanoids -- and conjures space where none exists.
In this densest of American cities, she is that quintessential professional: the space doctor.
A few years back, Scott arrived at the door of Clara Hemphill and Robert Snyder. The middle-class couple had location -- the Upper East Side. They had a good public school for their two children and Central Park and a world-class museum three blocks from their front door. All so fine -- except their one-bedroom apartment, stem to stern, encompassed 735 square feet, or about one-third the area of the average American home.
They could move or they could squeeze. They squeezed.
"It was the most extreme situation I've worked with," recalled Scott, 55, a wry, willowy woman who helped the couple install fold-out tables inside bookcases, shrink bookcases -- only six inches for paperbacks! -- and turned two rooms into four. "It's spatial problem-solving. You can get this or you can get that -- you just can't get a lot of both."
In a McMansion Age, New York is a throwback to a steerage-class era. Hemmed in by a superheated real estate market, the average middle-class New Yorker searches for space with the intensity of a hard-luck prospector panning for gold. New Yorkers pile clothes on top of radiator covers and behind sofas and rent storage rooms the size of studio apartments. High-reach garment hooks and 30-pair over-door shoe bags are a necessity, and crawl spaces are to lust for.
For some, desperation alone drives habitat decisions. But many middle- and upper-middle-class families more or less pragmatically arrive at the decision to rearrange American notions of personal space. Those who value cities, from New York to San Francisco, Boston to Washington, come to view their restaurants and parks, hot dog stands and sidewalks, as extensions of their homes.
'Very small slice of the apple'
In New York, prosperity is measured by the eighth of an inch. It's the sort of city where a block-long Container Store in Chelsea rises as a temple; where a three-bedroom, 1,500-square-foot co-op retails at a cool $2 million or so; and where a Corcoran Group real estate ad can proclaim, more or less with a straight face: "GREAT OPPORTUNITY TO LIVE IN THE MOST EXCITING NEIGHBORHOOD ON THE UPPER WEST SIDE FOR ONLY $140,000! This studio apartment is very quiet with a huge window and . . . "
This same studio is 250 square feet, including the shower stall. The window opens onto an airshaft.
"It's not a bright space, and the bathroom is maybe the smallest I've ever seen -- I don't think I could stand at the sink," said Marc Lawrence, the real estate agent. "What you're getting is a very, very, very small slice of the apple."
Scott, the space doctor, often fields calls to work on such spaces. An accomplished watercolorist when she is not rearranging living quarters, Scott landed in New York in the early 1970s, a refugee from New England with artistic ambition and precious little money. She found an apartment in a big old brownstone on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a place whose ambiance was not quite captured by the term "fixer upper." "It was a hellhole," Scott said.
She launched into reconstruction, still ongoing after 20 years. She erected an elegant sleeping loft, rearranged walls, built office space. She hauled the debris out at night, the better to shield it from a landlord's prying eyes. Today, she has an onyx fireplace and hinged walls and a chef's micro kitchen, with spices and spatulas climbing 12 feet up. The white-painted loft bed has recessed lights at the head and seems to float in the high-ceilinged space. A Vermeer-like light suffuses the place.
She brings that eye to her work. She calculates: Who lives here? How do they use space? Who's in charge of the kitchen? (Whether the chef is short or tall, female or male, can change everything.) She recalls walking through Snyder and Hemphill's apartment and taking in all 735 square feet. At the end, she paused and said: "If you and Rob are willing to sleep in one place and dress in another room, you could stay here until your children go to college."
With Scott's help, the couple turned one bedroom into two, rearranged walls, shrank doors and hung a dish drain over the sink. They found a Danish refrigerator that was eight inches taller than normal and two inches narrower. Their 8-year-old daughter has an artful windowsill desk and their son, who is 10, has a loft bed. Everyone has learned to fold their shirts in thirds.
'Ruthless in what you toss out'
Snyder and Hemphill brought their own sensibility to the reconfiguration. Her brother had already installed a larger arch in the living room, and smaller doors beyond, the better to create the illusion of spaciousness. Then one summer evening, they took a sailboat cruise with some friends in New York Harbor. She dipped down into the captain's cabin. "They were admiring the sunset and I was thinking: 'These quarters are exactly the size of our bedroom. Look at how much space you can save.' " Their bedroom -- formerly the west wing of their living room -- has room only for a bed, which has mahogany-stained sides that curl above the mattress like a ship's hull. At the back, the reading lights have handsome shades, cut in half to fit against the wall. Under the bed, there is storage space for the collapsible kayak.
"I suppose it sounds ludicrous, but it's a very clean aesthetic," said Hemphill, who directs , which evaluates the city's public schools. "You think about everything -- do I need that extra catalogue? Can I get that book at the library? You are ruthless in what you toss out."
More recently, Scott has worked on the West Side, taking Nana Kurosaki's three-bedroom, prewar apartment and retrofitting it for five children. There are bike trees and built-in cabinets and cove lights and a dining room divided in two -- behind the hinged glass door is the bedroom for Kurosaki and her husband. For Thanksgiving dinner, they fold up the bed, exposing more cabinets underneath.
"I grew up in Tokyo," Kurosaki said with a shrug. "You learn to live small."
Scott is taking a break from redesigning habitats to paint and sculpt. But still the calls come in -- more New Yorkers desperate to retrofit their lives to fit this city.
"My problem is that I get curious," Scott said. " 'How many kids?' 'How little room?' 'A prewar building?' There's always something that can be done."