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The mandate: incorporate a young couple’s love of Ancient Rome, James Turrell skyspaces, and stormy beach days into a tip-to-tail renovation of an 1840s Greek Revival brownstone. Fortunately for these clients, a pair of tech executives with a now toddler daughter, the ensemble team they enlisted for the three-year undertaking arrived with a shared understanding of their dream and a surfeit of creative ideas to achieve it.
“Building our home and building our family are forever entwined for us,” the wife explains, underscoring their deep personal investment in the project. Local architecture firm the Brooklyn Studio and its partner Brendan Coburn, who grew up down the block from the property and now lives around the corner, had masterminded several similar projects in the neighborhood. “There’s definitely a Brooklyn town house look nowadays, and one thing we loved was how each of the Brooklyn Studio’s previous works felt distinct,” the husband comments of their choice in architect. “They clearly tailor to each family rather than rehashing a particular aesthetic.” Meanwhile, AD PRO Directory interior designer Augusta Hoffman, whose work the homeowners had admired for some time, added a clear-eyed approach to functional interiors and a knack for serene, evocative spaces.
Case in point was the stairwell in a two-story extension on the back of this 4,800-square-foot edifice; it offered the perfect opportunity to accomplish part of the bespoke brief. “The stair is just a lovely piece of sculpture; it’s what architects fantasize about doing all the time,” says Coburn of the mahogany piece, whose domed skylight nods to both Rome’s Pantheon and Turrell’s skyspaces. “We felt that location is a moment where we can marry those two interests,” adds The Brooklyn Studio project manager Jenna Balute, who worked hand-in-glove with the contractor from Chilmark Builders, Inc. (It also complements the home’s more traditional mahogany Queen Anne–style staircase running through its core.) “As you move toward the back, it becomes a more minimal, ethereal language and experience,” she notes of the gradual dissolution of crown moldings, baseboards, and intricate trim toward the garden, where a large Juneberry tree and other lush plantings put on a show for much of the year.
“Overall it was a very intentional, minimal, almost modern Parisian approach,” concurs Hoffman of the clients’ early vision for the public and private spaces covering five stories (including a new windowed penthouse reading room). “It was important to us that our home balances beauty with practicality,” says the wife, and Hoffman’s “elegant but relaxed work was love at first sight.” Though the designer admits a penchant for using rich colors, she didn’t fumble here delivering a cooler palette of blues and grays that, regardless of season or hour, evokes a stormy day at the beach. Custom furnishings covered in a rash of sumptuous textiles, creamy plaster walls, and visual Easter eggs—as seen in the bathrooms, each of which takes inspiration from a different locale loved by the clients, and in the nursery, with its hand-painted James Mobley murals depicting even more places of personal import—gave it the warmth for which Hoffman’s oeuvre is known. Living room artwork by Robert Mapplethorpe and one-of-a-kind de Gournay wallpaper further enhance the abode’s tailored aura.
In the end, the designer and architects were highly attuned to natural light, they say, and it guided most of their critical decisions—from the relocation of the kitchen to the parlor level to the sheer window treatments and Venetian plaster lining the walls. “Drinking a morning coffee and getting a meal together for our toddler while the light shifts in our skylight and dances through the trees outside our breakfast nook, seeing the sunset echo in the warm colors of our penthouse reading room, and settling in for a screening in our moody den,” reflects the wife, “I love how the home works with its environment at all times of day and across the seasons.”