A Harlem House That Can Baby-Sit
EXPANDING the footprint of their houses and apartments is a luxury few New Yorkers have. So it is not surprising that when Nicole Betancourt and Bray Poor, an artistic couple with two young children, decided they wanted a courtyard in their Harlem brownstone, they created one inside the house: By removing parts of the floor and ceiling, they carved out an interior opening that permits light, sound and smells to travel up and down three floors, keeping the family connected.
“We lived in Mexico a couple of years, and all the houses had internal courtyards,” Mr. Poor says. “We talked a lot to the architects about what could be done to make our house like that, and they came up with these huge holes that go all the way up to the third floor. A lot of our friends said, ‘That’s going to drive you crazy with the kids yelling,’ but when they start to go at it like kids, we get to talk it out before they draw blood.”
“And when I’m cooking, I know when things are done,” adds Ms. Betancourt, who founded the Web site Parent Earth, which promotes healthy eating for families, and who therefore happens to do a lot of cooking. “If the smell reaches up there,” she says, referring to the children’s floor above the kitchen, “it is totally done. What is not great is that if you do burn something, the bedrooms smell like burned food.”
The stair rails and the exposed beams might stop a child or an errant adult from falling through, but what about toys from the children’s room?
“Roll-y toys can fall through,” Ms. Betancourt says. “We have had parties where people are having cocktails, and toys come through the roof. But the wrath follows afterward.”
Ms. Betancourt and Mr. Poor, who have been married 12 years, are a creative couple. Mr. Poor, 46, is a theater sound engineer, former actor and musician. And yes, Bray Poor is his real name. His father “was very WASPy,” he says. “WASPs love using last names. People ask me all the time, did I make up that name. Why would I make up a name that combined the sound of a donkey and poverty?”
Ms. Betancourt, 44, is a documentary filmmaker whose mother was once a nun and whose father renovated town houses in Brooklyn. She won an Emmy for her 1996 documentary, “Before You Go: A Daughter’s Diary,” which dealt with the death of her father, secretly gay for much of his life, from AIDS.
They have two daughters, Pilar, 8, and Biúlu, 4, and making time for family is not something they simply give lip service to. They left SoHo to live in Mexico for two years, renting out their loft, not just because they were disgusted with how commercial the neighborhood had become, but because they wanted to be able to enjoy life together.
“It was the typical New York story,” Mr. Poor says. “There wasn’t enough time to be parents, enough time to be lovers, enough time to work properly.”
In SoHo, Ms. Betancourt says, everyone seemed to be 33 and “sort of beautiful.” There were no old people or extended families or bands of children running around having a good time. But in Mexico, where “families in general move as a unit,” Mr. Poor says, their priorities began to shift.
In early 2007, planning to return to New York, they looked for property. They quickly zoned in on Harlem, a multigenerational, multiethnic neighborhood. As it happened, the trendy commercialism that had turned them off in SoHo was what enabled them to buy a home: the loft they had bought there in 1996 sold for more than $2 million in 2007.
During their search, they looked at dozens of town houses but rejected those inhabited by impoverished elderly tenants. Telling people who were already in bad shape that they had 30 days to leave was not something they wanted any part of, Mr. Poor says. In September 2007, after nine months of looking, they found a beat-up town house in South Harlem for $1.4 million. (The tenants were students paying by the month, so it was a guilt-free purchase.)
The house, which appears to have been built in the late 1800s or early 1900s, retained a bit of its original ornamentation — some carved woodwork and a staircase in the entry hall, marble fireplaces on the second floor — and the couple didn’t want to lose it.
“We wanted to mix two things: a sense of modernity and visual neatness,” Mr. Poor says. “But we also didn’t want to do away with the organic nature of the house. It’s a Victorian house. We didn’t want to just scrap it.”
“We also like the underside of things,” Ms. Betancourt says. “Growing up in New York, I like the grid, the raw quality. We have some unfinished surfaces.”
The couple hired the architects Gregory Merryweather and Lawrence Blough to do a gut renovation that cost $675,000. The ground floor was turned into a two-bedroom rental unit. The master bedroom and bath and Ms. Betancourt’s office are on the top floor; the children’s bedroom, playroom and bath are on the floor below; and the main living space is on the parlor floor. Ms. Betancourt is especially pleased with the kitchen’s placement.
“With most galley kitchens we see, they put it at one end of the room, and people cram themselves into the kitchen, and the space at the other end becomes almost this dead zone,” she says. “With it in the middle, the kitchen is the center of family life, as opposed to something you hide away or get stuff from. You can hang out in the living room or hang out in the dining room, because the kitchen is in the middle. It is literally the hearth: the warm center point of the family in the center of the house.”
“And when I’m cooking, I know when things are done,” adds Ms. Betancourt, who founded the Web site Parent Earth, which promotes healthy eating for families, and who therefore happens to do a lot of cooking. “If the smell reaches up there,” she says, referring to the children’s floor above the kitchen, “it is totally done. What is not great is that if you do burn something, the bedrooms smell like burned food.”
The stair rails and the exposed beams might stop a child or an errant adult from falling through, but what about toys from the children’s room?
“Roll-y toys can fall through,” Ms. Betancourt says. “We have had parties where people are having cocktails, and toys come through the roof. But the wrath follows afterward.”
Ms. Betancourt and Mr. Poor, who have been married 12 years, are a creative couple. Mr. Poor, 46, is a theater sound engineer, former actor and musician. And yes, Bray Poor is his real name. His father “was very WASPy,” he says. “WASPs love using last names. People ask me all the time, did I make up that name. Why would I make up a name that combined the sound of a donkey and poverty?”
Ms. Betancourt, 44, is a documentary filmmaker whose mother was once a nun and whose father renovated town houses in Brooklyn. She won an Emmy for her 1996 documentary, “Before You Go: A Daughter’s Diary,” which dealt with the death of her father, secretly gay for much of his life, from AIDS.
They have two daughters, Pilar, 8, and Biúlu, 4, and making time for family is not something they simply give lip service to. They left SoHo to live in Mexico for two years, renting out their loft, not just because they were disgusted with how commercial the neighborhood had become, but because they wanted to be able to enjoy life together.
“It was the typical New York story,” Mr. Poor says. “There wasn’t enough time to be parents, enough time to be lovers, enough time to work properly.”
In SoHo, Ms. Betancourt says, everyone seemed to be 33 and “sort of beautiful.” There were no old people or extended families or bands of children running around having a good time. But in Mexico, where “families in general move as a unit,” Mr. Poor says, their priorities began to shift.
In early 2007, planning to return to New York, they looked for property. They quickly zoned in on Harlem, a multigenerational, multiethnic neighborhood. As it happened, the trendy commercialism that had turned them off in SoHo was what enabled them to buy a home: the loft they had bought there in 1996 sold for more than $2 million in 2007.
During their search, they looked at dozens of town houses but rejected those inhabited by impoverished elderly tenants. Telling people who were already in bad shape that they had 30 days to leave was not something they wanted any part of, Mr. Poor says. In September 2007, after nine months of looking, they found a beat-up town house in South Harlem for $1.4 million. (The tenants were students paying by the month, so it was a guilt-free purchase.)
The house, which appears to have been built in the late 1800s or early 1900s, retained a bit of its original ornamentation — some carved woodwork and a staircase in the entry hall, marble fireplaces on the second floor — and the couple didn’t want to lose it.
“We wanted to mix two things: a sense of modernity and visual neatness,” Mr. Poor says. “But we also didn’t want to do away with the organic nature of the house. It’s a Victorian house. We didn’t want to just scrap it.”
“We also like the underside of things,” Ms. Betancourt says. “Growing up in New York, I like the grid, the raw quality. We have some unfinished surfaces.”
The couple hired the architects Gregory Merryweather and Lawrence Blough to do a gut renovation that cost $675,000. The ground floor was turned into a two-bedroom rental unit. The master bedroom and bath and Ms. Betancourt’s office are on the top floor; the children’s bedroom, playroom and bath are on the floor below; and the main living space is on the parlor floor. Ms. Betancourt is especially pleased with the kitchen’s placement.
“With most galley kitchens we see, they put it at one end of the room, and people cram themselves into the kitchen, and the space at the other end becomes almost this dead zone,” she says. “With it in the middle, the kitchen is the center of family life, as opposed to something you hide away or get stuff from. You can hang out in the living room or hang out in the dining room, because the kitchen is in the middle. It is literally the hearth: the warm center point of the family in the center of the house.”
A version of this article appeared in print on March 15, 2012, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Harlem House That Can Baby-Sit.