*브루클린 타운하우스- Modern Becomes Eclectic in This Renovated Brooklyn Townhouse

Lacoste의 운동화 디자이너인 Merrill Lyons와 조명디자인회사의 창업자인 Charles Brill 부부는 브루클린 Gowanus에  3층 구조의 브라운 스톤으로 지은 집을 구매하기로 했다.
본인이 인테리어디자이너의 딸이자 건축가의 여동생이었기에 그녀는 Studio DB와 함께 인테리어 디자인 컨설턴트로 일하게 되었고 이후 Lyons Studio를 창업하게 되었다.

부부는 아파트 리노베이션을 함께 작업하면서 부부가 모두 좋아하는 미학적인 감각에 촛점을 맞추고 Gowanus의 타운하우스를 위한 스타일을 확장시키기로 했다. 예산도 한정되어 있고, 아들이 두달 후에 태어날 예정이었기에 6개월 안에 리노베이션을 끝내야 했다. 그러나 이러한 제약에도 부부는 매끄럽게 콜라보를 잘 해냈다.

완전히 개방된 모던한 레이아웃과는 반대로 브라운스톤의 전통적인 바닥 플랜을 선택했다. 획일하된 시대적인 유행을 싫어하고, 펑키한 것을 좋아하고 빈티지함을 사랑하는 아내 덕에 조명 선택은 공평하게 유지되었다.

When interior designer Merrill Lyons and Charles Brill, a cofounder of lighting design company Rich Brilliant Willing (RBW), purchased a derelict 1901 three-story brownstone in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn in 2014, they came into the property well rehearsed in the art of renovating a home. Both graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design, they had bought and gutted a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan in 2009, two years after they met.

“When I renovated in the East Village, it brought out something in me,” says Lyons, a former athletic footwear designer who at the time had recently left a job at Lacoste. Fortunately, the transition allowed her to discover what may be a hereditary predilection. The daughter of an interior designer and sister of an architect, she found work as an interior design consultant for Studio DB, a design-build company in Manhattan, and later started her own firm, Lyons Studio.

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Her husband is likewise a man badly bitten by the renovation bug. Brill’s parents encouraged him at a young age to create, rip apart, and fix things—like his first car, a 1980 Volkswagen Rabbit. “We had to tow it home, and I’d spend evenings repairing the car and welding its gears,” Brill recalls. “My father would come out at night in his underwear and tell me to go to sleep.”
When the couple worked together on the apartment renovation, Lyons fine-tuned an aesthetic that they both liked so much, they decided to revisit and expand the style for the Gowanus town house. Gutting it down to the brick facade, beams, and stair railings, the couple finished the renovation in six months with a budget of $300,000; two months later, their son was born.
Where others may have buckled under pressure, the couple worked seamlessly as collaborators. The process was simple: “Merrill would get fabric and wallpaper samples and present them in a curated fashion. I helped make refinements—like the final tone of a light gray,” says Brill, who refinished the mouldings and panels and worked with his father to build the three-story staircase and install the outdoor deck.

The couple chose to retain a traditional brownstone floor plan, “as opposed to a completely open, modern layout,” Lyons says. Though Brill remained impartial to her lighting choices, “she had specific ideas of where to use RBW designs,” he notes—several of which can be found throughout. Often large statement pieces, the lighting pieces are as emphatic as any of the furnishings in the home and wed nicely with Lyons’s design tendencies. “I like adornment, I like color, I like funky things,” she says. “I love vintage.” She dislikes any kind of uniform period design, whether Victorian or a sleek, monochromatic minimalism; she mixes high with low, and clean, modern lines with 19th century–style mouldings.

The vestibule is a telling snapshot of her warm, appealing, and idiosyncratic style. The walls are partly painted in burnt coral and partly papered in a delicate floral pattern. On the floor are small black and white tiles, arranged to spell out “HELLO.” Paired with an Eames Hang-It-All wall rack, an Akoya pendant by RBW transforms the tiny entryway into a mini urban mudroom.

The living room, by contrast, is an ode to Scandinavian design, furnished with rosewood armchairs and a Danish-style leather sofa that the couple brought over from their previous home. The bright kitchen, too, was designed in reference to Nordic country homes, says Lyons, with a palette of white walls, muted green cabinetry, and gray trim. Hanging above the table is RBW’s airy and versatile Palindrome 6 chandelier, an oversize, Mobius strip–like piece equipped with swiveling light heads. Made with a tubular-steel frame that can be reconfigured, it can also be suspended vertically or horizontally. Down the hall, luxurious materials and finishes make up a dramatic, pocket-size powder room, richly textured with a foliage-patterned Hermès wallpaper and a custom sink of swirling green and midnight blue soapstone.

from dwell