Winter 2025
Dispatch from Our Dumbo Office
Some people dread winter. Not us. We love the clarity that comes with cold weather, the fresh start of a new year, not to mention mogul skiing! Whether you’re a longtime collaborator or just getting to know us, welcome to our seasonal newsletter. Here’s what’s keeping us warm this winter.
Project Spotlight: Upper West Side Brownstone
We just wrapped up a dream project. The gut renovation of a brownstone on the Upper West Side for a wonderful multi-generational family, the project required a cellar excavation and two new extensions (rear and rooftop). The resulting double-height spaces are spatially thrilling, and the flood of daylight allows for some dramatic indoor gardening. For the kids, we installed a custom climbing wall; for the grandparents, a new elevator and a private deck; and for the parents, a lavish kitchen for multiple cooks and a stainless-steel hot tub on the roof.
It’s an Honor Just to be Nominated
This season, Sherman Architects is suddenly raking in the design awards. First, we won a Bluestar Kitchen Design Award for our Prospect Heights Communal Kitchen. Then Archello Awards 2025 chose our Riverside Drive Apartment for their Interior of the Year award. And finally the coup de grâce: the Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and Global Design News chose not one but two of our projects for their 2025 Future House Awards: “The award program seeks to define the best and most innovative cutting-edge designs for residential architecture.” – Global Design News
Seriously, it really is an honor. Most of our work is only experienced privately, by the people we designed it for, so it’s especially meaningful to see our designs publicly praised by the industry.
What We’re Loving This Season
- Material Crush: Whitewashed ash—there is no better way to show off the clean cathedral grain of ash wood than with a white stain. The combo is our go-to winter neutral.
- Local Treasure: Changing Lanes is a jewel of a documentary by Brooklyn filmmaker Ben Wolf. On view at the Architecture & Design Film Festival, it’s a surprising contradiction—a beautiful and emotionally charged movie about traffic. Specifically, how byzantine local politics has blocked an easy fix to a heinous problem: that the poorly designed McGuinness Boulevard in Greenpoint routinely kills pedestrians and bike riders.
- The Perfect Coffee Table Book: The Architecture of Trees by Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi combines our two favorite things into a precisely rendered atlas of arboreal forms.
Studio Notes
- We’re bidding out a new freestanding house in Rumson, NJ—a shed roof over black, vertical, cement-board siding!
- Hired by a terrific Carroll Gardens developer, we’ve started construction a fully reconfigured five-unit multi-family.
- And we’ve just unrolled our schematic designs for new row-house additions in Brooklyn Heights and Bed Stuy.
Stay Connected
We love hearing from you. Whether you’re planning a project or just want to talk design, drop us a line. And if you know someone who’d enjoy this newsletter, feel free to forward it.