For New York City architect Brent Buck, good architecture starts with how a place feels to live in. That conviction has shaped years of work on townhouses across Brooklyn—and now it’s guiding his first ground-up condominium project, 110 Boerum Place, a 21-residence building in Cobble Hill that borrows more from the neighborhood’s historic brownstones than from the usual brand-new condo playbook.
Buck didn’t come up designing flashy residential towers. After graduate school at Yale, he spent a decade working with the illustrious Todd Williams Billie Tsien Architects, where he cut his teeth on highly detailed cultural, institutional, and residential projects before launching his own studio eight years ago. Early commissions were small—single-family homes and townhouses—and set the tone for everything that followed. As Buck puts it, “Those projects become really specific and about the detail and about the user and our clients and their hopes and interests in design.”
So when it came time to design a multifamily building, Buck approached it less like a conventional condo tower and more like a bunch of individual homes stacked together. “While this project has 21 residences,” he says, “we tried to approach the design of each [unit] through the lens of the individual spirit and characteristic of that unit within the building.”
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An aerial view of 110 Boerum Place, in the heart of Brooklyn’s historic Cobble Hill neighborhood.
Darcstudio
One thing Buck was determined to avoid was what he describes as New York City’s “rectangle problem.” Many multifamily buildings, he notes, are limited to a single orientation. “They have an exposure on the front and an exposure on the back,” he explains. “Some apartments take advantage of both of those. Some of them all face one direction.” At 110 Boerum Place, developed by Avdoo, the building’s massing is carved into a series of corners, giving most residences at least three and in some cases as many as five exposures.
That shift fundamentally changes how an apartment functions and feels to be inside. Buck points to the way daylight moves through a space over the course of the day, shaping where bedrooms and living spaces feel most natural and reinforcing the sense of a residence that evolves with daily life rather than remaining static.
Outdoor space was another priority. Many of the residences open directly onto loggias or private roof terraces, allowing living, dining, and kitchen areas effortless connections to the outdoors. While the project had to contend with a complicated zoning envelope—it straddles two different zoning districts—Buck embraced those limitations. “As architects, one of the great facilitators of solutions is a set of rules,” he says. “We thrive on the constraints of projects and think that the best solutions come from and address those constraints.”
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A rendering of the fireside living room in the light-filled penthouse.
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Every brick on the exterior was hand placed, allowing subtle imperfections to remain visible, with Buck describing the goal as to create a building that “from the outside, appear[s] to be handmade.” The material and the high level of artisanal craftsmanship help break down the building’s scale and connect it to Cobble Hill’s historic brownstones.
The taut balance between expert craftsmanship and scale is something Buck continues to explore elsewhere, including Frame 122, one of New York City’s first mass-timber residential projects approved under current building codes. Bigger projects may be on the horizon, but his priorities remain consistent: designing multi-family buildings that still feel personal, detailed, and deeply tied to the nuances of how different people live. Pricing for homes at 101 Boerum Place starts at $2.975 million.
Click here to see more renderings of the Brooklyn condo.
Darcstudio
Authors
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Abby Montanez
Abigail Montanez is a staff writer at Robb Report. She has worked in both print and digital publishing for over half a decade, covering everything from real estate, entertainment, dining, travel to…