Almost no floor, almost no closet, and a great deal of wall. Everything else follows from that.
A pre-war apartment is a set of constraints that arrived together. Rooms that are small in plan and tall in section. A closet count that would be illegal in a new building. Plaster over lath on the partitions and masonry on the party wall. Cast iron under the windows. A staircase that was not designed with a sofa in mind.
None of that is a defect. It is the reason people want these apartments, and it is why the storage problem in one is genuinely different from the storage problem in a house in the suburbs.
It is also worth saying at the outset that Brooklyn is two housing stocks, not one. There are the brownstones, tenements and pre-war apartment buildings, which is most of it — and there are the converted industrial buildings, which are the opposite problem in almost every respect. This post is about the first. The second is its own post, and if your walls are brick or concrete and your ceiling is 14 ft, start there instead.
1. The floor is the expensive surface. The wall is free
Start with the economics, because they dominate everything else.
In a dense city, the floor of your apartment is the most costly surface you will ever own or rent, priced by the square foot at a rate you can look up. The wall above about 5 ft is worth nothing and is doing nothing.
A bookcase stores books by spending floor. A wall-hung system stores the same books by spending wall. The arithmetic is not subtle — a 12 ft run of 12 in deep bookcases occupies 12 sq ft of floor, and the wall-hung equivalent occupies none — and there is nowhere it is worth more than in an apartment where the whole room is 11 by 13.
The corollary matters as much. Pre-war units were built with very little storage — often a single closet for an entire apartment — so storage here is not a thing you optimise, it is a thing you add. And once you accept that it has to be added, the only question is which surface it comes out of.
2. Tall rooms want a system that goes up without a special part
Pre-war ceilings are high, and most shelving stops at about 6 ft because that is how tall a bookcase can be before it becomes a hazard. The result is a strip of unused wall running around the top of every room in the apartment.
The Shelf Standard is 85 in and ships as two 42.5 in halves with a coupler in the box, so a taller wall is not a different product — it is the same $49 part, bought again, coupled, and given a second track partway down where the lower half's hook lands.
The honest use for the top of a tall wall is storage rather than shelving: things you have decided not to reach, above the height where you would rather not be on a ladder. In an apartment with one closet, that is not a compromise. That is the entire point.
3. Plaster, and the fact that the wall is not flat
The partitions in these buildings are plaster pushed through wooden lath, and there is structure behind it — the lath is nailed to studs, so the framing is there and usually findable.
Two things about it are worth knowing before you plan a wall.
The framing is irregular, because a century of renovations has happened to it. That is a solved problem if the fixings do not have to land in a particular place, which is what a track drilled every inch is for.
The wall is not flat, which is the one that surprises people. Old plaster undulates, and shelving screwed directly to a wall inherits the shape of the wall — the columns end up at slightly different angles and depths, and the shelf fronts stop lining up. Hanging everything from one levelled track instead absorbs that once, at the wall, so the shelving is aligned to itself rather than to the plaster.
If your wall is the masonry party wall rather than a partition, it is a different fixing and a different set of decisions — and in a brownstone you frequently have one of each in the same room.
4. Picture rails, radiators, and the things already on the wall
The reason generic shelving advice fails in these apartments is that the walls are not empty. They came with features, and the features are usually staying.
The picture rail. Many of these rooms have a moulding running horizontally a foot or two below the ceiling. It is worth treating as a gift rather than an obstacle, because it means the room already has a horizontal line near the top of the wall — and a track line set parallel to it reads as though it belongs, where a line that fights it looks like a mistake. One warning: a picture rail is for pictures. It was never intended to carry shelving loads, some are barely fixed to anything, and nothing here should hang from one.
The radiators. Cast iron under the window is close to universal in this stock, and it owns the wall below the sill and a working clearance around itself. Wall-hung shelving is the rare storage that can simply start above it and leave the radiator, its valve and its heat alone — and it is worth keeping deep shelves off the wall directly over one, both for the air and for the day somebody has to get at the valve.
The windows. Pre-war rooms often have generous windows with reveals, and the wall between two of them can be a narrow, useful pier. This is exactly what a 42.5 in half-standard is for: both halves of the standard are usable parts, so a short high run between two windows costs half a standard and two shelves rather than a special order.
The doors. A railroad layout, or any room you walk through, leaves short wall runs interrupted by openings. Bays of 24 in and 36 in and depths of 8, 12 and 16 in are what you have to work with, and in a room you pass through at shoulder distance, 8 in is frequently the right depth — deep enough for most books, shallow enough not to be something you turn sideways for.
5. And it has to get up the stairs
The unglamorous constraint, and the one that decides more purchases in this borough than any design argument.
A four-storey walk-up with a turn at the top of each flight sets a hard limit on what furniture can physically enter the apartment. It is the turns that fail, not the doors, and everybody who has tried to get a wardrobe up one knows the exact landing where it stopped.
Nothing in this system is longer than 42.5 in, everything arrives as parcels rather than freight, and one person can carry the whole of a bay up several flights in more than one trip. That is not a small thing when the alternative is measuring your stairwell before you are allowed to buy a bookcase.
What this costs
You are drilling a pre-war wall. One row of screws into the track, and everything else hangs — which is about the smallest amount of damage shelving can do — but plaster does not patch as invisibly as new drywall, and if you rent, this is a conversation with the landlord first.
A bowed wall still shows somewhere. Hanging from a track moves the wall's irregularity to the gap behind the shelving instead of the front edge of the shelves. It does not eliminate it, and no system does.
The system needs a wall. It cannot divide a room, and in a small apartment there is a real argument for a piece of furniture that can. If what you need is a partition, this is not it.
And a built-in would look more finished. Millwork fitted to one of these rooms — into the alcoves beside a chimney breast, scribed to the plaster — will always be more integrated than something modular. It costs several times as much, it takes weeks, it needs the landlord's consent if you rent, and it stays in the apartment when you leave. Those are the terms; for some people they are worth it.
If you are planning a wall in one of these apartments
- Work out which wall you have. Lath partition, masonry party wall, or furring over brick. It changes the fixing and nothing else.
- Measure the piers, not just the wall. The space between two windows and above a radiator is usually the most useful surface in the room, and it is the size a half-standard fits.
- Decide what lives above 7 ft. In a one-closet apartment, that band is the storage you do not otherwise have.
- Set the track line against what is already there. The picture rail, the window heads, the door casings. A line that agrees with one of them disappears; a line that agrees with none of them is the first thing you see.
- Go shallower than you think in rooms you walk through. Eight inches holds most books and returns the corridor.
The parts this post describes: the Shelf Standards at $49, shipped as two usable 42.5 in halves for exactly these walls; the Hangtrack at $35 and $39, drilled every inch because pre-war framing is not on a grid; and the Shelves from $84.99 in 8, 12 and 16 in depths. Desh Home is in Atlanta, and the system was drawn for American walls — including the old ones.
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