It all started when Ed Schnurr retired. In leaving his job as a technician at a high-end automotive dealer, he needed to find alternative storage for his four vintage cars. He owned a 1968 AMC AMX, a 1974 AMC Gremlin, a 1990 Lotus Elan, and a 1930 Ford Model A that he started driving at age 12 and later inherited from his father.
Where would they live? The most obvious answer was to build a garage in the large, empty yard of the modest bungalow that Schnurr shares with his wife, Jan Moscowitz, in Needham. Moscowitz, who owns the graphic design firm Studio laPlancha , wanted in. “If I had a big space with a table, I could spread out projects without having to clear them off for dinner,” she reasoned.
Fair enough. So began a rather lengthy design process. “As a designer, I’m a difficult client,” Moscowitz admits.
After toying with very modern ideas, Moscowitz hired Clay Benjamin Smook of Smook Architecture & Urban Design to devise a more traditional plan. She showed the resulting drawings to an architect friend in New York — Arthur “Woody” Pier of Pier, Fine Associates — who merged traditional with modern and fine-tuned the project’s scale with respect to the couple’s 1930s bungalow. Ultimately, Moscowitz worked with Robert Curatola of Rockwood Custom Building on further refinements during construction.
For Moscowitz, who lived in the United Kingdom for many years, her vision riffed on old terrace houses later graced with contemporary additions to offer in.
