PG Renovation Contest: Large Project Category Runner Up

Atticus and Garry's Lawrenceville Home

Atticus & Garry in the Studio

Kitchen

Living - Dining Room

Conceptual artists Garry Pyles and Atticus Adams, renovated their Lawrenceville studio/home so as to dramatically display their whimsical artwork which features everyday materials like wire, plastic and metal mesh.  Once inside, you realize that their home actually spans two adjoining buildings. They live mostly on the upper floors and rent out a one-bedroom, 2,000-square-foot space on the first floor.  The former machine shop on the left still wears its original 1954 brick, while the balloon-frame 1890s grocery on the right, in a playful nod to Lawrenceville's industrial past, is faced in corrugated galvanized steel. But what really earned the home the title of runner-up, large project category (more than $50,000), is the 6,000-square-foot interior.

A celebration of light and air, with long, exposed beams and ductwork, the loft-style home is a modern artist's dream: big, but not gigantic, with lovely bones just aching to be revealed.  But when they purchased the two buildings four years ago for $150,000, they were jam-packed with so much ... stuff that the pair had a winding path of only about 18 inches to get around. Scrap metal, old store fixtures, work benches, framing lumber, metal shelving, machinery -- you name it, the former owner had collected it and stacked it from floor to the ceiling.  It took the men a year and a half just to empty the space. More than 100,000 pounds of scrap metal went to a recycling facility, and they also filled an entire Dumpster with screws and bolts. Other items ended up on Craigslist.
 
Some improvements, including the rubber roof, are brand-new or second-hand discoveries from Construction Junction (doors and windows) or Craigs­list (the mid-century cherry-red fireplace in the corner). Many more are creative repurposings of items and materials they uncovered during the clean-up. A 20-foot-long work bench, for instance, was refashioned into kitchen cabinets; metal shelving they discovered in the rafters was turned into open storage units with all-thread bolts and washers hung from the joists; teak paneling from a steel company's boardroom decorates a wall in the foyer and was used to build a small deck off the kitchen. They also built a pavilion in the living room from old 2-by-4s and laid a floor of 2-by-6-foot pieces of hickory that came out of a steel mill in Follansbee, W.Va.

One no-brainer was the 3.5-by-9-foot kitchen island, which the previous owner made from maple salvaged from a bowling alley. You can still see the pin holes in the corners. Another was the six-burner Imperial commercial range hidden under piles of junk.
 
Financing proved to be a bit of problem, as it was tough to get lenders to understand the project and how someone could live in an industrial space. Even today, says Mr. Adams, people want to put in applications for the restaurant they thought the men were going to build.

Visual artists need plenty of space to create, so when designing their studio in what had been the second floor of the grocery, they had Lawrenceville contractor The Christie Group remove a walled staircase to the attic and build a new one, without hand rails. The master bedroom, which adjoins a private bath with concrete floors, is on the first level, off the front door. A second bedroom at the rear of the house, used by Mr. Pyles' youngest son, has a ladder to a sleeping loft.

The home is intentionally unpolished, with some of the repurposed materials begging for a good coat of decorative makeup or perhaps even a wall to keep things out of sight. The water heater, usually a hidden mechanical, stands out in the open in the pantry, and even the new ducting is exposed. But that suits its occupants just fine.

"Most people like things buttoned up," says Mr. Pyles, "but I like things unfinished."


Lawrenceville
Metro Pittsburgh Real Estate