Tour an 1870s Brooklyn Brownstone Remodeled to Let the Light In

Little was lost—the excised floor space contained only bathrooms, laundry, and closets, easily replaced elsewhere—and much was gained. On a quotidian level, the renovation makes it much easier for the family to shout at one another. On a loftier one, it brings a great deal of beauty into their lives.

The skylight, its frame completely hidden, has a James Turrell–ish quality: Looking up, all you see is sky. Sunlight bathes the stairwell’s curving, limewashed walls, and changing shapes of light and shadow travel from one side of the house to the other as the sun traverses from east to west.

The staircase itself was crafted in North Carolina of rift and quartered white oak, a material that can “take a beating,” as McLoughlin puts it, that will gracefully absorb years of collisions with kids’ water bottles, sneakers, and toys and daily encounters with the oils from hands large and small. “We designed with an eye toward materials that would wear well over time,” says Freundlich. “This is a house for a young family that lives hard. We used white oak here and throughout the house to make it feel warm, organic, a little bit less austere.”

A new spiraling staircase clad in rift and quartered white oak rises five stories through the house. The runner is a custom design by Proper Rugs.

Countering austerity became a concern once the team decided to take a more modern tack. “We went back and forth with the clients about different aspects—should we save this profile, this moment?” says McLoughlin. Ultimately, reconciling the goals of modernizing the house to make it more functional and maintaining its original details (some of which were showing their age) proved too difficult. But no one wanted cold, angular modernity; they wanted warmth and interest in tune with the building’s roots. “The original crown and baseboard details have all of these decorative barrel shapes and stepped profiles that really carved light and shadow, and we were eager to find a way to do that in a modern language,” says McLoughlin. He devised kitchen counters with a thin, highlighted edge that falls away to shadowed, recessed pulls on the drawers below it, and a semi-recessed, beveled baseboard that responds to light with more flair than a straight surface.

The same attention to detail was extended to the functional needs and aesthetic preferences of the clients. There had to be storage, lots of it, everywhere. “There’s a drawer for some sort of toy in every room,” says Emily Lindberg, who led the interior design. “Our goal was to provide unfussy solutions to practical needs.”

An artwork by Jessica Dickinson hangs above an Urban Archaeology tub with Vola fittings in the primary bath. The walls are covered in dark-tinted tadelakt plaster, and the flooring is concrete tile from Mosaic House. Pinch pendant light from The Future Perfect.

Art: Jessica Dickinson

Winey hues, a favorite of the couple’s, are also everywhere. The walls of the back parlor turned kitchen are finished in a rosy plaster, and the statement-making hearth is clad in custom-crafted tiles ranging from burgundy to a rich port. The furniture is uniformly low-slung, capacious, and nap-friendly, the fabrics and rugs casual, colorful, and hard-wearing. Some of the most distinctive accents, from the Annie Albers–style rug in the living room to the eye-popping wallpaper in the family room, were commissioned from women artisans, and the house abounds in unique finishes. “Not a lot of clients are interested in taking this much risk with color,” says Freundlich. “It gives it warmth and character and covers up a mess. Things need to be quite immaculate against a white background. But the animation of life looks quite good against a colorful one.”

This story appears in AD’s June 2023 issue. To see R.A. McBride’s home in print, subscribe to AD.