![Brooklyn Mass Timber House by Schiller Projects](https://az-media.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/awards/2024/06/20112439/Azure-AZ-Awards-2024-Interiors-Residential-Brooklyn-Mass-Timber-House-Hero.jpg)
Built in a 19th-century former coach house in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighbourhood, this family home supports the notion that mass timber — a typology that replaces carbon-intensive steel and concrete with carbon-sequestering wood — is as appealing from an aesthetic perspective as it is from an environmental one. The central interior feature is a stunning three-storey staircase made from glue-laminated Douglas fir with a soaring second-storey bridge. The stair’s slatted treads allow illumination from a newly added skylight to filter down to the ground floor, where a coal ash pit turned planter adds biophilic harmony to the brick-walled space. In creating the first mass timber single-family residence in New York City, the architects at Schiller Projects took particular care to prioritize a light environmental footprint, including details like cabinetry made from salvaged wood veneer and flooring repurposed from the building’s former structural beams.
![Brooklyn Mass Timber House by Schiller Projects](https://az-media.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/awards/2024/06/20112455/Azure-AZ-Awards-2024-Interiors-Residential-Brooklyn-Mass-Timber-House-02.jpg)
Team: Aaron Schiller and Colin Cleland; with Acheson Doyle Partners; Jim Bannon (Bensonwood); Jim Mattison (Mattison Millworks); Russell Greenberg (Tri-Lox); and Benjamin Goldrich (Stickbulb)
In creating the first mass timber single-family residence in New York City, the architects at Schiller Projects took particular care to prioritize a light environmental footprint.