In this week’s Pop City, SPRINGBOARD’s Loft House is featured in an article entitled “Cool and Contemporary Pittsburgh Architecture.” Here is the link: http://www.popcitymedia.com/features/daringarch0805.aspx. The article focuses on what the writer describes as “a new breed of local architects’ who are ‘livening up the way Pittsburghers live….Lofts and light and green, green everywhere! Can contemporary, daring, idea-based architecture co-exist with traditional neighbors? As a matter of fact, it can.”
“When it comes to context,” writer Abby Mendelson continues, “Paul Rosenblatt’s Squirrel Hill Loft House looks any other 1,400-square-foot Douglas Street house, which is exactly how it began life. Arriving in 1988, the native New Yorker, and Yale-trained architect came to take a Carnegie Mellon teaching position, eventually creating his own firm called Springboard. Married to Amsterdam-native quilt artist Petra Fallaux and living in Squirrel Hill, they fell deeply in love with Pittsburgh.
By ‘95 they bought a house but yearned for Downtown’s emerging lofts. They wanted the best of both worlds — Downtown living with Squirrel Hill’s tree-lined, walkable shopping district and coffee shops. “We had to figure out a way to get the space we needed,” Rosenblatt says. After all, there was his treasured vinyl record collection, her studio, and of course a Living Room and Master Bedroom worthy of the names. The brilliant-yet-oh-so-simple solution: “I built a 2,700-square-foot loft and attached it to the house,” Rosenblatt shrugs.
With its wood finishes, and towering views of his backyard greenery, the Loft House – column-free, all wood, with floor-to-ceiling windows — “showed city dwellers that you could have a loft in the middle of the city,” Rosenblatt smiles. “You can have your cake and eat it.”
