Brownstone Brooklyn today is a mishmash of architectural styles, from Italianate to Queen Anne—you can even spot the stray federal or colonial. When Matthew Ransom of Overhead Architecture took on a Cobble Hill townhouse renovation of a landmarked building, he looked to its neo-Grec origins to inspire motifs throughout the 6,000-square-foot, 4-story single family home. The theme plays out especially in the stunning kitchen, a 2-story addition with custom white oak millwork, Calacatta countertops, Fisher & Paykel appliances, and a showstopping plaster frieze that frames the kitchen. Overhead developed the scalloped pattern for the frieze after researching catalogs for early-1900s neo-Grec townhouses, opting to create custom designs rather than sourcing existing materials. “That’s the funny thing,” noted Ransom, recently named one of AN’s Twenty to Watch residential architects in New York. “A lot of the details that we go to great lengths to preserve in these townhouses are often off-the-shelf components from one hundred years ago.”
Almost nothing about this project is off-the-shelf. Overhead and interior firm JFD Creative started from a blank slate, with a project brief to update the home for a young family to be able to age in place. One of the moves, Ransom explained, was to add an elevator in the house’s core; another was to create privacy and flexibility in the top-floor children’s rooms. From there, he said, the idea was “to bring the house back down to earth,” not leaning into the brownstone vernacular. “We don’t have any Corinthian capitals or pilasters. It’s more abstract than that.” The team developed a “simple material palette” to bring continuity to a townhouse that had been through several renovations over the past century-plus.
The 25-foot-wide extension into the backyard served a double purpose. “It gives the [family] really killer kitchen space,” Ransom explained, “and it was sort of a pressure release valve for the rest of the house,” allowing the architects to thoughtfully size the rooms throughout—a rarity in brownstone Brooklyn. The centerpiece is an island with a view of the yard through Kolbe windows, with added light streaming down from a skylight above.
A 2-story skylight over a soaking tub, part of a wet room that includes a shower in the main suite’s bathroom, provides more natural light that changes throughout the day—a discreet LED strip in the shaft can be activated for a warm glow at night. Meanwhile, a bath/powder room on the house’s main floor features wainscoting in a tile by Ann Sacks and unlacquered brass fixtures that will patinate over time.
This may be the only overt throwback reference in an otherwise quietly modern home that blends in unremarkably from the outside but which shines within.