Blowing Out the Back Wall and Creating Farmhouse Flair in a Cobble Hill Brownstone
This Cobble Hill brownstone was transformed from a crummy four-unit apartment building into a warm and spacious single-family home with a kitchen chefs can only dream about.
Talk about a fixer-upper. When children’s clothing designer Odette Williams first set foot in her future home — an 1880s brownstone in Cobble Hill — she knew it had seen better days. Converted into a four-unit apartment building decades before, the home’s lower floors had remained vacant for years. And looked it.
But with the help of architect Lorraine Bonaventura, Williams and her spouse Nick Law gutted the entire structure to create an open, modern haven with a touch of farmhouse flair.
Out went layers of dingy linoleum, uncovering wide pine boards that went into storage for safe keeping and eventual reinstallation — along with the home’s original staircase, handrails, and balusters. Bonaventura’s design called for blowing out the back wall and replacing the rear parlor-level facade with a 12-foot-wide set of glass accordion doors that open fully to the outside.
For the kitchen’s show-stopping feature, four beefy movers hauled a 500-pound AGA stove up the seven-step stoop, placing it in between IKEA cabinets where additional supports had been installed to hold its massive weight.
“I come from a theater background, and a set designer once told me, ‘The best thing to do if you don’t have a big budget is to put one great prop in. The rest will come together,'” Williams told Lonny. “And so that was the AGA stove.”
Upstairs, the master bedroom is a study in minimalism, with little more than a bed, two side tables and a rug. The pillows are from ABC Carpet & Home.
Williams and Law have four kids, and their daughter Opal and son Ned share this room with a set of bunkbeds.
The trough sink in kids’ upstairs bathroom was found at Demolition Depot in Harlem.
For more photos of the home — especially that kitchen! — see the rest at Lonny.
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