Wallkill Mill

AThe brief

The owners bought a four-storey brick mill with a working waterfall behind it, a roof that had been open to the sky in two places since 2009, and a floor plate 148 feet long with windows only on the two short ends. They wanted an inn. Their first architect had drawn a corridor down the middle with fourteen identical rooms off it — which is the obvious answer, and which would have produced fourteen rooms where you could not tell what time of day it was. The mill's own logic, and the reason anyone would drive ninety minutes to sleep in it, was the light off the water. The plan needed to give that away rather than wall it off.

BWhat we did

We cut two light courts straight through the floor plate — one at each third point — and hung the circulation off them as open galleries rather than a corridor. That costs four rooms. It buys every remaining room a window onto a court and a view down to the falls, and it turns the route to your door into the best two minutes of the stay. Structurally the courts let us stitch new steel into the existing timber frame at the points it was already failing, so the intervention that made the building work architecturally is the same one that made it stand up. Everything new is steel, glass, and white oak, detailed to sit half an inch clear of the brick so you can always read which century you are touching.

CThe decisions

1. ---

   01

   Two courts, four fewer rooms

   We ran the numbers before we drew it: fourteen rooms at the rate a windowless corridor supports, against ten rooms plus a bar at the rate a light court supports. The smaller building earns more. It took one meeting and a spreadsheet, not a mood board.

2. ---

   02

   New work never touches old brick

   Every new element stops half an inch short and is held on a blackened steel shadow gap. Nothing is faked, nothing is distressed, and the mill reads as a mill with a building inserted into it.

3. ---

   03

   The falls stay audible

   The rear wall glazing is operable in all ten rooms and the mechanical design assumes people will open it. That meant hydronic radiant instead of forced air, which the guest reviews now mention more than the beds.

4. ---

   04

   Turbine house left alone

   The 1904 turbine house was sound, ugly, and irrelevant to the programme. We stabilised it, lit it, and did nothing else. It is the first thing guests photograph.

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