The Insider: Kitchen and Bath Upgrades Freshen Park Slope Townhouse With Obama Connection
The single-family residence has extraordinary and extensive original woodwork on the parlor level, but the kitchen and a bath were tired.

Photo by Matthew Rauch
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The Park Slope house where Barack Obama rented a top-floor apartment after graduating from Columbia has long since been converted back to a single-family residence — one which happens to have extraordinary and extensive original woodwork on the parlor level. The only remnant of Obama’s tenure is a claw foot tub.
“It’s a private house, and it doesn’t look like it was ever chopped up, but it still shows up on Google Maps as ‘Barack Obama’s Former Townhouse,’ complete with five-star reviews, so people think it’s some kind of museum,” said Matthew Rauch of Chelsea-based Rauch Architecture, whose firm was tasked with freshening up a couple of discrete areas in the heavily detailed bow-front brownstone, in partnership with Bolster, a Manhattan-based design-build company.
While Rauch’s brief was only for a kitchen facelift and a new second-floor bath, the architect was very conscious of doing justice to the building’s pedigree. “Our interventions were very minimal, but were about trying to modernize the interiors while also preserving what I think is one of the best-kept examples of turn-of-the-century brownstone interiors,” Rauch said. “We tried to introduce something that felt new, but not alien.”
The kitchen Rauch encountered had been renovated in the 1990s and had dark countertops and “beige-greige floors,” he said. New geometric tile floors satisfied the homeowners’ wish for something dynamic and bold.
The existing bathroom was “funky,” Rauch said, with cracked tile and a cramped corner shower. “The clients’ main ask was for a bathroom that worked well and was relaxing and calming, kind of spa style, with a freestanding tub — an oasis in the house,” Rauch said. Though it’s the primary bath, “We kept a door to the hallway because it’s a convenient location in the middle of the house, and the kids sometimes use it.”
The existing original detail informed Rauch Architecture’s aesthetic choices throughout the project.
In the garden-level kitchen, the richly colored cherry cabinets remained in place. Rauch replaced the countertops with a Dekton porcelain countertop with marble-like veining, running it up the wall to form a backsplash. The ceramic tile floor has an arrow-like pattern. “From the entry into the stair hall on the garden floor, it guides you toward the kitchen,” the architect said.
The black and white flooring extends into the breakfast area, whose walls above the cherry wainscoting were painted deep blue.
The all-new bathroom had two original doors, which Rauch kept for function and because “they’re beautiful oak doors with trim, and I would have felt guilty taking them out.”
The walls are wrapped in a uniquely shaped handmade tile — Caspian Sea Paseo from Fireclay Tile — with a custom indigo glaze that gently reflects light into the space. The custom mosaic floor tile pattern is intended to reference the period of the house’s construction, right around the turn of the 20th century.
The architect deemed the brass Dornbracht fixtures, including a rainfall shower head, “modern but not too avant-garde, simultaneously classic and contemporary.”
[Photos by Matthew Rauch]
The Insider is Brownstoner’s weekly in-depth look at a notable interior design/renovation project, by design journalist Cara Greenberg. Find it here every Thursday morning.
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