Once-Bland Brooklyn Heights Home Now Wows With Wallpaper and Period Details
When Alex and Oliver Wight purchased their Brooklyn Heights condo two years ago, there wasn’t much in the space to inspire them. A developer’s renovation in the 1980s had reduced the triplex unit into a boring white space devoid of its original 19th-century detail. But with the help of David Nastasi and Kate Vail of…
When Alex and Oliver Wight purchased their Brooklyn Heights condo two years ago, there wasn’t much in the space to inspire them. A developer’s renovation in the 1980s had reduced the triplex unit into a boring white space devoid of its original 19th-century detail.
But with the help of David Nastasi and Kate Vail of Nastasi Vail Design, the home is now a showstopper featuring playfully patterned wallpaper and elegant details.
The triplex is one of five units in a 19th-century brick mansion that had once housed a Civil War general and later a women’s club. But no hint of its colorful past was visible by the time the Wights came along.
Nastasi and Vail set about injecting contemporary character and bygone charm into the blank white void. They added walls to create defined spaces in the then-open layout and details that would have fit with the style of the home’s heyday — antique pocket doors, crown molding, picture rails, and baseboards.
“We wanted to bring back a lot of the period-appropriate details without making it feel old,” Nastasi told Lonny in a recent profile of the home. “It was more about creating an interpretation of what might have been there.”
But it’s the wallpaper that really makes the home a knockout. The dining room’s light blue pattern is a tiger-themed print by Clarence House. The wall space beneath the chair rail is covered in a textured, dark blue grasscloth.
In the entryway, Schumacher‘s Queen of Spain wallpaper adds visual pop. The dark-painted molding adds a more modern touch than natural wood or white.
The wallpaper in the kids’ room is a design depicting misbehaving moneys.
The warm, muted tones of the master bedroom’s grasscloth walls give it a different feel from the rest of the home.
But perhaps the most visually arresting space is the home’s glossy black kitchen with its chevron-patterned floor.
“I saw it in a magazine years ago, and it was one of those images I just couldn’t get out of my mind,” Wight told Lonny.
The home has more surprises, including a secret television cabinet and circular office turret. See the rest of the home on Lonny.
[Source: Lonny | Photos: Genevieve Garruppo | Style: Sarah Jean Shelton]
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Tasteful and elegant. There is nothing like wallpaper to change up a room. To quote daveinbedstuy :
“I would imagine that anything out of the ordinary (in the truest sense of the word) would be HORRID to most people.”
The only thing I would change is the ladder in the kitchen.
The dining room chairs don’t work for me and I wish there was more color in the kids room.
LOL at the ladder in the kitchen. There is no way they have that there all the time. How silly.
They also have high bookcases with a rail in the living room, so the ladder is prolly there 99.9% of the year.
That black kitchen?! Just say no to resurrecting 1980s design trends.
LOL, you have 9′ ceilings. But seems higher to you, huh?
(ducks for cover)
LOL, that’s exactly what I thought of the light fixture. A birdcage.
huh? Dave! Say it ain’t so!
A charcoal grey would have been better.