seven stories of remarkable transformation

Some people would gaze into a Red Hook warehouse filled with junk and say, "Thanks, but I think I'll stay in my current apartment, all the same." Others, like artists Dustin Yellin and Charlotte Kidd, sign on the dotted line, bring in the Dumpsters, and turn it into a wonderfully imaginative live-work-show space. Then they add a vintage Airstream trailer—inside the house—because having one was always Yellin’s dream. This is just one of the tales of transformation in the biannual home-design issue of New York Magazine.

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When architect Bill Peterson and development partner Carol Swedlow bought this sixteen-foot-wide brownstone on East 14th Street in 2004, it had one tenant—a ground-floor check-cashing joint—and the upper stories had been vacant for decades.

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When Ghiora Aharoni first began renovating his apartment in a tenement building on Leroy Street in the West Village, he felt ever so slightly like Indiana Jones. “It was like an archaeological site,” says the Israeli-born principal of Ghiora Aharoni Design Studio. “So I learned about the tenement and got all the information I could” about the vernacular of a particular kind of turn-of-the-century architecture.

Read more here.