Using scavenged castoffs, lots of imagination and plenty of hard work, Brownsville Academy HS students, under the guidance of art teacher Susan Tuthill, transformed the school’s art gallery into a fully furnished, ready-to-occupy studio apartment by the school year’s end.

“Students took garbage and turned it into decorative, functional items and did a lot of problem-solving, working in teams like professionals,” said Tuthill, who integrated every unit in the art curriculum into the yearlong project.

The project participants became the Tuthill Design Firm.

Step 1 was the creation of a floor plan and scaled furniture cutouts that the students could move around until they decided on the final placement. The students then proposed and voted on color schemes and materials. And every nine weeks a new set of artisans picked up the storyline.

An art student in the painting unit created a series of paintings for the windows that provide a view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline at dusk. Others created framed pictures for the walls or designed wallpaper. Ceramicists made all the food and dinnerware on the dining-room table, the half-eaten pizza on the coffee table and scores of other household items and tchotchkes.

“Students were so enthusiastic that when I assigned one project I got three,” Tuthill said. “The kids saw it as a home they wished they could have some day.”

The idea for the project germinated before Tuthill was even hired last September at the Brooklyn transfer school — once a furniture factory. During her job interview, she realized the gallery space on the third floor of the Brooklyn school was the size of a studio apartment and she began to imagine all the possibilities. By September, the project had completely taken shape in her mind.

“But I had my fingers crossed,” she admitted.

Back at work after five years as a stay-at-home mom, with a business background, a few years of classroom experience and a master’s degree in art, she was eager to start.

It all began slowly: The students measured the space, explored designs and floor plans, created design boards, choose color schemes and fabrics, and began to seek out and reassemble all the discards they would need to accumulate over the year to make a home-sweet-home.

“We went the whole year without running out of materials,” Tuthill pointed out. She called herself “the project manager.”

Students describe the décor of their dream home as “shabby/chic,” an eclectic combination of modern and traditional that will appeal to both men and women. Who would have imagined rubber-band spaghetti, a standing lamp made from the bottom half of a store mannequin and a game table made from a stack of tires with an aquarium in the center?

This apartment has everything.

The lamps and chandeliers even light up because students learned how to wire them.

“We had to work really hard together,” senior Corry Campbell explained, “but we had opportunities we never had before.”

To cap off the project, Tuthill had the students envision the studio apartment being put up for sale and the buyers that it would attract.

A student video captures the story of the fictional couple who fall in love, marry and snap up the 900-square-foot apartment the minute it hits the market.

Campbell, the senior, played the bridegroom in the video. Scattered around the apartment are the wedding photos taken by photography students that give the place a lived-in feeling.

“The most important experience the scholars and I will take away from this project is a very simple one: setting a goal and being able to feel the unbelievable experience of reaching that goal,” Tuthill said.

When the apartment’s artwork and furnishings are auctioned off this September, Tuthill will reveal the theme of the project for the 2014–15 school year, a secret she has kept “to keep our fans hanging off the edge of their seats.”