Tour a Serene Brooklyn Brownstone Built Around a Family’s Favorite Places

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.

The rear stair, crafted from stained mahogany to echo the home’s central Queen Anne–style staircase, is another point of great interest in the residence. Using a 3D printer to create multiple versions—“the way your hand felt as you were going down was really an important part of that experience,” notes Coburn—project manager Balute happily obsessed over the sculptural element. “Brendan’s the guy with the big ideas, and then I try to make it sexy,” she says. The Venetian-plaster walls and limestone floors amplify the hushed James Turrell–inspired experience in the space, which is topped with a glass skylight. The stools are by Green River Project.

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.

To maximize natural sunlight and views through the garden-facing windows, the Brooklyn Studio team encouraged the homeowners to bring their kitchen up one flight of stairs from the garden level to the parlor floor. Though the clients are not avid cooks, they still spend much of their time in the space, which includes Pierre Augustin Rose stools covered in a Pierre Frey fabric, ceiling fixtures from Apparatus Studio, and white-oak-herringbone floors. The contractor on the project was Chilmark Builders, Inc.

On the garden level, a more formal dining and bar area, termed “the loggia,” offers direct access to the rear landscaped greenspace and grill area. A ceiling light designed by Hoffman illuminates a vintage marble dining table surrounded by circa-1960s Joe Colombo for Pozzi chairs. “It’s amazing to be able to host a summer dinner party and open all the doors to the backyard,” observes Hoffman.

“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.