Some people would gaze into a Red Hook warehouse filled with junk and say, "Thanks, but I think I'll stay in my current apartment, all the same." Others, like artists Dustin Yellin and Charlotte Kidd, sign on the dotted line, bring in the Dumpsters, and turn it into a wonderfully imaginative live-work-show space. Then they add a vintage Airstream trailer—inside the house—because having one was always Yellin’s dream. This is just one of the tales of transformation in our biannual home-design issue. Up on 14th Street, architect Bill Peterson took on an abandoned wreck of a building and made it into a state-of-the-art model for the new brownstone, with a front wall that rolls open like a garage door. Down on Leroy, architect Ghiora Aharoni has carved an amazing space out of two tenement apartments by approaching the project as a kind of archaeological dig and demonstrating new ways in which cramped living quarters can breathe free. (He’s also installed an ecofriendly, emissions-free fireplace, something not available in Jacob Riis’s era.) Meanwhile, over in Chelsea, architect Douglas Fanning has made an ordinary rear terrace into a miniature farm. True, such transformations often cost a lot of money, and most people cannot afford to put miniature lightbulbs in Louis XVI wall brackets beneath Chinese porcelain birds so that their living room becomes a glowing aviary, as master interior designer Howard Slatkin has done in his 6,000-square-foot Fifth Avenue apartment. But the mere fact that someone has done this may just send you scrambling over to Pearl River to see what you might achieve with fewer renminbi. Was and is: What could be more satisfying to contemplate after the year we’ve just had. For as bad as things may have appeared when our intrepid designers first walked into these downtrodden spaces, where there is a will, there is always a way. And sometimes there is an Airstream.

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