photograph by selavie photography
The original second-floor kitchen space had a high ceiling. Shapiro lowered the ceiling and used it as the floor for this new lounge space, which has a view of Downtown Memphis.
The line of homes that cozy up to the South Bluff all have one great asset in common: The panoramic view of the Mississippi River. But not all of these homes take full advantage of their location, says Brad Shapiro of Shapiro & Company Architects. In 2020, he was called by a couple who were considering purchasing a home on the bluff, and he immediately noticed mistakes made when the property was designed.
“I think a lot of people walked through this house and didn’t buy it,” he says, “because obstacles blocked the view. It was not capturing the river view.”
photograph by selavie photography
The ground floor now has plenty of space and light, and offers wonderful views of the home's setting on the Mississippi River.
Shapiro’s firm is focused on residential architecture, both new construction and renovation. “I walk through a lot of houses. As I say, you have to kiss a lot of toads before you find the prince or the princess,” he says. “It’s often hard for a client to see past what’s right in front of them. It’s hard for them to visualize what could be.”
When he walks in, he immediately recognizes the potential. “When I see a wall, I can see right past it, almost like x-ray vision, if you will. I see all the possibilities. I don’t see the constraints. I’m very optimistic to begin with. What are the assets and how do we magnify and amplify those assets? In this case, being right on the bluff, the view was the immediately obvious asset. However, I don’t know that the first homeowner understood the opportunities they had — I don’t think they recognized they were on the river! There were walls in locations that shouldn’t have walls.”
He says getting to know the client’s needs is the most important early step in the process. “Clients always tell me later, ‘I had no idea why you were asking so many questions about me, and my family, and my life.’ Who visits, and who doesn’t visit? How long do they stay when they visit? All this stuff. But they know why I was asking those questions after we finished the project.”
In this case, “What was there did not suit them at all.“
photograph by selavie photography
Originally, a blank wall greeted anyone using the stairs on the second floor. The new layout opens up views from the dining and living rooms.
Going Up
The biggest problem was immediately evident. The original lots offered on the South Bluff were small, so builders went up. This home is three stories tall, with a garage taking up much of the ground floor. Access to the living areas was via a long staircase. “If [the clients had] started talking about their knee surgeries and their hip replacements, I would’ve said, ‘I don’t think this house is for you,’” says Shapiro.
Even though the garage is built into the house, anyone parking there would have had to go outside and re-enter through the front entrance. Two small flights of stairs, one from the front door and one from a small porch facing the river, converged on a landing leading to the second floor. A small bedroom on the first floor lacked any windows at all.
photograph by selavie photography
The original staircase, which intruded on the interior space and blocked the views from the home's windows.
As for the staircase itself, “It looked like an office building,” says Shapiro. “It was bulky. It had sheet rock, low walls, and just a little top pipe handrail. And it blocked the views, so when you walked in that front door, you were immediately hit in the face with this bulky, obtrusive looking stair. Other than going up and down the house, it provided no interest at all.”
Shapiro’s solution to the staircase problem would become the centerpiece of the remodeling project. Instead of a bulky and conventional staircase, “We wanted it light and transparent, sculptural and floating. Then it would allow views through to the river.”
The redesign simplified the space with a steel-based staircase by Viewrail. “The steel is lightweight, and it carries a lot more load than wood does,” says Shaprio. “We were able to make the stairs almost float.”
The floating staircase, with its barely-there glass railing, is instantly striking. “It became the focal point coming in, the very first front-door impression,” he says. “The stairs became not only a functional way to get to all three floors, but a sculptural element, an art element in the house that lacked such a strong feature.”
photograph by selavie photography
The light fixture in the living room brings the ceiling down without interfering with the views from the third floor. The couch faces the home’s most stunning views.
Interior designer Janice Reed used the stairs as a jumping-off point for her work in the house. “Janice understood well the opportunity,” says Shapiro. “She was able to continue the architectural theme in the interior design, which is that transparency and that openness, a more modern feel. She developed the concept we had established in the architecture, so it wasn’t fighting agendas.”
Reed is an acclaimed Memphis-area designer with decades of experience in high-end homes. “I felt like this was an incredible opportunity to create something special, because it is such a unique riverfront setting,” she says. “When you hit that entry, it’s all about the stairwell. It’s like it’s floating.”
Once she noticed how the stairs meshed with the existing metal and the glass, she began her work. “I started picking out materials, like in the dining room, and the stone that we picked out for the countertops,” she says. “Then that turned into black cabinets. Once we had this white, black, and metal, I started trying to keep those things going throughout that second floor to not distract from the view.”
Clearing the stairwell of visual clutter meant opening new wall space for art — and created new challenges for the designers and builders. “You would not believe how hard a time we had getting furniture up to the second and third floors,” says Reed. “The artwork that’s in the entry weighed a ton. We had to use mobile scaffolding to raise it up so that we could get between the staircase. It was pretty bizarre.”
photograph by selavie photography
The original staircase connecting the three floors of this South Bluff home “looked like an office building,” says architect Brad Shapiro. He replaced it with a steel-based stair by Viewrail, which opened up the home’s views of the Mississippi River and provided plenty of new space for art.
Making the View
Rethinking the staircase design was only the first step, says Shapiro. The second floor required its own radical rethink. “When you came up the stairs, you were looking right at a wall,” he says. “It had a kitchen, dining and living room, but they were clearly three separate spaces.”
The living room ceiling soars up two stories, providing more vertical space for the windows overlooking the river. The kitchen in particular posed challenges. A wall separated it from the rest of the floor, and the dining room to which it connected was built on a slightly raised platform.
“Not only visually was it blocked off from the river, but physically you had to literally step up into the dining room and step back down into the living room,” says Shapiro. “The way a lot of people live these days, the kitchen is not an isolated space. It needs to be part of the whole living area.”
photograph by selavie photography
The new tub and backsplash bring elegance to the bathroom.
But in this home, the kitchen was a separate room. “Very little natural light was getting into that kitchen area,” he says, “and the kitchen was a peninsula-type design, almost like a cul-de-sac. We removed the floor platform, opened up the walls, and completely reconfigured the kitchen into more of a big island-shaped kitchen area, which provided circulation and flow. You could be at the kitchen sink looking out and be able to see the river, the sky, and the sunset.”
Reed added a unique glass feature on the wall of the dining room area. “That glass is absolutely gorgeous on that back wall. It looks like diamond, but it actually is cut so each little facet has light bouncing off of it.”
Getting the cavernous living room just right meant a little trial and error. “I have worked with builders for over 40 years, so I’ve learned that they’ve got to have everything up front,” says Reed. “You don’t wait till the last minute. You pick everything out and hope that everything works, because it’s only going to make it hard for everybody if we don’t have the materials there.”
Reed began purchasing furniture, trying to figure out how to provide the best view looking towards the windows. “I wanted a sofa right there, but it would not line up across the way in the corner,” she says. “So we kind of reshaped the ceiling so that sofa could look directly towards the corner and be centered. It was really interesting, and was one of those things that I was so glad I called about, because if I hadn’t, the furniture would have never placed correctly.”
Reid selected hanging light fixtures for opposite corners of the room. “I knew somehow I’ve got to pull these ceilings down, so that’s why I went to both corners,” she says. “One corner has one large fixture and the other corner has two small fixtures offset from a big window in the master bedroom. They wanted to have a view up there, so we had to be careful because you didn’t want a huge chandelier plopping down right in the middle of it.”
The dark color palette in the kitchen and dining room contrasts with the wide-open spaces of the living room. “You can get away with using a lot of black when you have a lot of light,” she says, “and black is very elegant.”
But using a lot of black is tricky, says Reed. “I’m one of those people that can do any type of room. If you want me to do French Country, I get into it. I love the challenge of change. But when I do contemporary, I do try to make it warm. I cannot stand a cold contemporary house. I try my best to always make people try to go the warm way instead of the cool way. You will get very tired of a cold house.”
photograph by selavie photography
The renovation added a new, larger window to the third-floor bedroom. Designer Janice Reed used color to connect with the natural world outside.
Living Larger
“It’s a nice-sized house, but it’s not a huge house,“ says Shapiro. “By opening it up, the house not only lives bigger, but with more natural light coming in, it just feels more uplifting. It lives larger than it actually is.”
photograph by selavie photography
The home’s all-glass corner provides the upstairs spaces with spectacular views.
On the third floor, the redesign added new space in a creative way. Even though the kitchen had been walled off from the living room, it still had a two-story ceiling. A window on the third floor only allowed a little light into the kitchen, but Shapiro says he noticed it provided a distinctive view of Downtown. “The two-story space in the living room was great. What an asset! But the two-story space in the kitchen was not an asset.”
By lowering the ceiling over the kitchen, Shapiro created the floor for a third-story lounge where the homeowners can watch TV or take their morning coffee. “Not only did it increase the livability of the home and the enjoyment of the home, but the appraised value went up tremendously,” he says.
The new space added approximately 500 square feet of living space. “You fairly inexpensively add a floor to it, and you furnish it, and you’ve got a view of Downtown. They probably spent $25,000 in construction, but we were able to capture $200,000 worth of value.”
Reed says that, while she, Shapiro, and the builders were radically transforming the house, the homeowners rolled with the punches. “We had a lot of fun,” she says. “We all came together and we created a beautiful home.”
