jeff tessier photography

Amenities & Style

I had the pleasure today of getting into the Herkimer Apartments at Herkimer & Bay in order to create some images to accompany an article that Graham Crawford of HIStory + HERitage is writing for Hamilton Magazine.  The building has been purchased by Steve Kulakowsky of

(along with some partners) and is undergoing a deep renovation in order to turn its apartment units into condominiums.  The Herkimer is one of Hamilton's oldest apartment buildings and is rightfully regarded as a vestige from the era(s) when the city nurtured the development of family-sized apartments designed for people who wanted to live in an urban environment, didn't want to settle for some small flat built into a house, but also didn't want to take on the committment of owning their own building.  The Herkimer, to say the least, has also always evinced a strong sense of style and grace.  Its conversion into condo units should be watched by those who are concerned about the health of Hamilton's downtown core, since the conversion not only indicates the kind and quality of urban living that might re-emerge as a standard option in the city, but also lets us see how the city's future has been assessed by people who must, because their money is on the line, be smart, judicious, and perceptive in measuring where this city is going.  Harry Stinson's conversion of the old

is, of course, another project with these qualities.

The model suite is done and it looks fabulous.  There are a lot of pot lights throughout and there's a lot of granite in the kitchen, but very much of the character of the original space has been retained and restored.  All the wood - and there's a lot of it - has been stripped and cleaned up, doorknobs retained and polished; the drawers built into the closets are still there; the wall safes in the closets (!!) are still there.  And the windows, while new and very utility-bill-friendly, have been redone so that they do not clash with the old trim framing them.  Also - and I think this is the greatest testament to the new owners' understanding of the building they've acquired - buyers have the option of passing on the renovations and instead purchasing a unit that has only been restored to its original state, meaning that it will have updated wiring, heating, etc., but will not have any walls removed, will not be given a modern look, and will not have new fixtures installed.  That's the unit I'd want, except that we'd need two of them and that would be about a million dollars.

But what about that modern look and what's lost when the old units get the conversion treatment?  Again, the new owners have done a great job: the new units they've produced out of the old have a lot of character, some retained from the old original and some smartly done and new.  But the decisive moment for me today was our brief trip into one of the unconverted aparments, when I had the chance to capture in photos a bit of what the Herkimer used to look like.

It was beautiful.  But not just visually beautiful.  It was a beautiful life, expressed through the space built to house that life.  And the beauty lived in the small details and odd spaces that grew out of a designer's attention to the amenities that real life requires and to the style that the good life desires.  This was evident mainly in the "built-in" fixtures that anchored this space, such as the bookcases (do we call them "shelving units"?) that bookend this fireplace.  It could also be seen in the way the bathroom was smaller than it could have been, but as big as it needed to be, because a wall angled into its space in order to create another, very small, room, an "other space" that would live in the daily life of the owner as that small space in which she hangs her coat / sets up the sewing machine / sits in a chair to talk on the phone.  And in the use of this space beside the kitchen:

The beauty of built-ins lies in this fact: this is your home, opening itself to you.  This is not what you buy at Ikea and use for a time, or anything you bring into the home and assemble.  It is not movable goods.  And the joy of having a home is in having a space that is not movable, a space that anchors.  Everything we move in and out of our homes - our canned goods and flatware, our clothing, and our mortal selves - is all movable goods, hence the comfort and peace in having the built space itself designed so as to be a stable and constant home for all that moves in and out of it, hence the smart pleasure we feel when the closets have built-in drawers, when the hallway features pantry cabinets, when bookcases are a part of the room, and when we rest at night in the Murphy bed that is also part of the wall.  Built-ins are a simple design decision but have massive impact on the experiential quality of living in a space.  The designers of the Herkimer Apartments, and all those like it, understood this fact.  That the new owners acknowledge this wisdom in the latitude they give their new clients speaks well of them.