A New York apartment gives you very little floor area, a co-op board with opinions, and a building that may be a century old. Precision is not optional.
Apartment and co-op renovations, brownstone interiors, and workspace and retail fit-outs.
Floor area is the most expensive thing in the room, so joinery has to work harder than furniture. Pre-war buildings bring plaster walls, radiators and out-of-square everything, which means surveying properly and detailing to reality rather than to a drawing. Acoustic separation between units matters and is usually a board requirement as well as a comfort one.
Co-op and condo board approvals, alteration agreements and strict building rules set the programme. Drawings need to satisfy a board before they satisfy a contractor, and that sequence has to be planned for.
Working across a distance is exactly where BIM earns its keep. The project is modelled and coordinated in three dimensions before anything is ordered, so joinery, services and finishes are resolved against one another rather than on site, quantities come off the model, and a local contractor can build from drawings that leave nothing to interpretation.
NYKS is a turnkey studio: the same people who draw the room are accountable for the room that gets built — design, artisan commissioning, procurement, site execution and handover. We do not take styling-only engagements. More about the studio and how it works is on the about page.
Where a project needs them, we bring in specialists by niche — a landscape designer when the garden is part of the architecture, a lighting designer when the room depends on how it is lit, MEP consultants so services are engineered rather than accommodated, and IT and AV consultants where the space has to be genuinely intelligent. Their work is coordinated in BIM against ours, so everything agrees on the drawing before it has to agree on site.
Through BIM and resolved documentation. The room is modelled in three dimensions and coordinated before work starts, so the specification a local contractor receives is unambiguous. Site presence is scheduled around the decisive stages rather than spread thin.
Board approvals and alteration agreements are planned into the programme — drawings have to satisfy a board before a contractor sees them.
Joinery does the work furniture cannot, and every division of space has to earn its purpose. That is the core of how the studio plans anywhere.
They are rarely square and rarely match their drawings. We survey properly and detail to what is actually there.
Design is resolved in full before mobilising, specification is written so a local contractor can build from it without ambiguity, and site presence is scheduled around board approval and the decisive construction stages.