A single room. Nothing on the lawn.

The brief

About a third of our work is for private collectors. Some are institutional collectors of long standing — collectors whose paintings and prints, after their lifetime, will go to a museum, and who would like the work to arrive in the condition they are now responsible for. Some are families holding a few specific objects — a Hudson River School oil, a set of Audubon plates, a 1920s railroad-camera collection — that they would like to keep where they live. A few are aspirational; most are sober.

The brief is consistent: do this with the existing house. Don’t put a chiller on the lawn. Don’t replace the boiler. Don’t remove the millwork. Don’t leave anything visible to a casual visitor that announces “there is something valuable in this room.” Engineer the room, not the property.

Scope & what we deliver

Our typical residential scope is a single room or a small suite, 80–800 square feet, brought to a Class A or As regime (we do not run AA in residential envelopes; the Tuesday-morning mechanical noise of the dehumidifier wakes a sleeping family member, and that family member becomes the first failure mode of the project). Most rooms we retrofit reach a verifiable ±1.5 °C / ±5% RH band on a 24-hour cycle.

The deliverable is a Gate-M3 mechanical schematic, a Gate-M4 build, a Gate-M5 equilibration plan, and a Gate-M6 retainer. The retainer is the part of the work most residential clients have not had before and find the most useful: a 24/7 telemetry contract whose alert traffic comes to us, not to the homeowner, on a phone that does not need to be answered at 3:00 a.m. by the person sleeping in the next room.

Discretion

We do not name our private clients. We do not photograph their interiors. We do not place a sign on the truck that announces what we do. The truck looks like an electrician’s truck. When we walk a collector’s house we wear what we wear at the shop and we sign in at the door with the housekeeper. We hold professional E&O insurance with a $4M aggregate, and we hold a separate cyber-insurance policy that covers the telemetry network we install. The provisions of all of these are available to clients on request.

The flip side of discretion is that we can describe our private work only in aggregate. The casebook on this site contains institutional projects only.

Typical projects we have run

• A Squirrel Hill rowhouse with four Audubon double-elephant plates: a single 110-square-foot library room brought to Class AA on a custom split system, vapor-tight door installed, a sensor mesh of four nodes. Four-month build, three-month equilibration. The owner reports that the room is also the quietest in the house.
• A Fox Chapel residence with a 19th-century Hudson River oil collection (eleven paintings): the existing two-zone heat pump rebalanced and a small dehumidification skid added in the basement. Class A, ±1.2 °C, ±4.5% RH on a 24-hour cycle.
• A North Side rowhouse holding a 1920s railroad-camera collection (acetate-base negatives plus prints): a 280-square-foot basement vault at 13 °C / 35% RH, with vestibule and dehumidified vapor barrier. The collection is now slated to outlive the building.
• A Mt. Lebanon house with a Greek-icon collection on permanent loan from an Athens-area religious foundation: a single-room envelope upgrade plus a precision air handler. The loan agreement specifies Class As; we hold it.

Several of these projects are now in their fourth or fifth year of standing-watch retainer. We have visited each of them at least once a year, on a quiet Tuesday morning, with a tool bag.

Cost

A typical single-room residential retrofit prices between $35,000 and $140,000 total construction, depending on the existing mechanical service, the envelope condition, the class chosen, and the discretion required. Standing-watch retainer (Gate M6) on a private site runs $5,400–$14,000 per year. We have one client whose retainer began in 2016 and has not paused.

Insurance carriers occasionally subsidize part of the retainer or part of the build — we have worked with Chubb’s Valuable Articles group and with AIG Private Client on cost-share arrangements. If your insurance is in that bracket, ask. If your insurance is in your homeowners policy, the answer is almost certainly no.

Begin a private-collection project

The first call is usually 45 minutes; we ask about the collection, the room, the family, and the level of discretion you require. We do not photograph anything. We do not visit a private home before a signed mutual NDA. Begin a private project.