“We love that type of Levittown-style houses,” says architect Devin O’Neill. “They’re very straightforward and honest about what they are and how they work.” When he and his partner, Faith Rose, were asked to design a home in the area from the ground up, they wanted to do so with a respect for the existing streetscape. “We wanted to take that form, and kind of twist it.”
This project can be read as an almost literal twist: The white stucco façade, asymmetrically punctuated by only two windows, looks like you’d expect the sides of a neighboring house to look, while the open rear reads almost as the front of a building. For the architects, though, design is intertwined with function. And their client, Ming Choy, had a tall order: to create a single home in which three branches of his family could live comfortably. The structure isn’t a postmodern riff on the American suburb; it’s a house meant for real life. “It’s about working with the collage of the neighborhood and translating that into how this family would use the space,” says O’Neill. (Rumaan Alam, NY Magazine)