Great Jones Alley

Nestled deep in lower Manhattan’s NoHo district, this mid-19th century industrial building retrofit uses salvaged and raw building materials to anchor the project to its light-industrial heritage while reimagining it as a homey residential retreat. The restoration of the cobblestone alleyway as the building’s entrance highlights its aged past and sensitizes the experience of new meeting old. A three-story tall vertical garden wall, framed in a Corten steel, terminates the alley’s deep view and inspires wonder and interest from its gated street view. Residents and visitors are welcomed and soothed by its continual seasonal changes and human-scale attributes. The garden wall’s verdant mix of distinct foliated evergreen textures and hues creates an eye-catching contrast to its rear yard building setting. A falling water fountain adds another feature to NYC’s largest exterior living wall garden. The soothing and gentle sounds of water complimenting the vertical garden’s scale and height are efficiently integrated as natural-world elements with the building’s new lobby pavilion. Harvested stormwater is recycled through the fountain’s cascading tiered troughs that empty onto the alley’s floor – infusing the natural world’s visual and audible elements as a multi-sensory experience.

The multi-level network of planted edges and walls establishes an immersive garden envelope as a welcomed contrast to its gritty “back-of-building” context. These landscape elements frame and define the 2nd-floor common roof terrace and provide privacy separation with the adjacent private apartment roof gardens. Their raw materials and shared architectural design language further elevate this residential conversion’s unique offerings to distinguish itself as one of the most sought-after downtown residential properties.