Something Old Inspires Something New

As an art historian, architect and designer, Carolyn Brooks has for 25 plus years helped law firms, banks and corporations of all kinds create spaces that work well. Meanwhile, the burned-out, boarded up four-story brownstone on Seventh Street that she bought in 1991 with her husband and renovated back to its own original 1903 beauty worked pretty well for her own family, even with just a single full bathroom for the top three floors they lived in.

But in 2009, when her beautiful, now 16-year old daughter, Sophia, demanded her own bathroom, everything changed. With this second renovation, Brooks and her husband (lawyer and businessman Allen Rothman) said a sad goodbye to her long-time downstairs tenant and played out her personal passions and those of her family’s, and in so doing, found the confidence and the courage to realize she could help other individual home and business owners find their passions too.

Brooks’ eclectic home is now a personal showcase and shingle for her new design business, Array Interiors. At first blush, from the outside, the owner and the house are quiet and unassuming. But as the bright red car Brooks parks just out front shows, there is a fire inside both that clearly shows in the many bold and unexpected choices peppered throughout the interior, decisions that feel both daring and at the same time perfectly appropriate.

From the first step inside, it is obvious Brooks has done something genius to make the standard 16-foot-wide house feel far larger and lighter than so many deep old brownstones do. While she partly credits that to the fact that the house had only two previous owners and was never broken into smaller living spaces, the real answer to its open feeling lies more in her study of how the 18th century Royals of Sweden managed to bring a sense of light into dark courts.

Gesturing to her airy spacious parlor (“originally closed and dark”) Brooks said, “I was able to pull light from one place to another by contrasting pale wood floors with dark chocolate oak and bold colors, by using reflective surfaces like mirrors and mirrored chests and placing them across from one another, and by putting in lights and anything glistening and gleaming.”

It is the challenges of her space that buoyed her in this inspired collaboration with her trusted contractor, John Kemp of John A. Kemp Construction Co.

The master bath, for example, presented a challenge in that a large claw-foot tub partially blocked the doorway. But Brooks decided to replace it with a floor-to-ceiling glass-enclosed shower against the windowed back wall, a his-and-hers featuring multiple showerheads that she says, with eyes closed, “is like a 15-minute vacation every morning.”

The main parlor floor, though, maybe best exhibits Brooks’ mantra of “Keep the Best, Toss the Rest, Create What You Need and Don’t Have." In the dining room a glass china cabinet, a drop-leaf table and a chest inherited from her antique-loving grandmother and mother sit just beyond the big round white-marble topped Knoll table she purchased 20 years ago, which is surrounded by Donghia’s modern interpretation of classic klismos chairs, and a huge brightly-hued canvas by Dick Wray, a painter from Brooks’ hometown of Beaumont, Texas.

Around the one working fireplace in the house(six others were far too costly to make work) and next to the center stair sits a modern chair-and-a-half lit by an Italian Fortuny lamp, one of two of the 20th century-designed fabric light fixtures that hang just in from the entry in a nod to the time period in which the home itself was built.

The mix of old and new is also apparent downstairs, beginning with the wine bar that went in to the center of the floor where the rental kitchen was, backed with shiny penny tiles and cabinets from Ikea, both in Brooks’ signature red.

In the front media room where Brooks’ business is now based, two of four leaded-glass doors remain in homage to the original bones of the place. But new and old again lay parallel with an au courante shag rug and a chaise and pharmacy lamp from Restoration Hardware.

The gym in the back boasts rubber flooring inspired by a similar one used at Equinox in Manhattan, which also serves to stop creaking floorboards. Workouts are overseen by the haunting war-time images of one of three paintings the couple has collected from Steve Mumford, an artist inspired by his embedment in Iraq. The downstairs boasts other of the couple’s many art acquisitions, including an inspired nature photograph from Austrian photographer Peter Lik and a whimsical mason jar painted by Brooklyn artist Rica Bando.

Upstairs, the Master Bedroom’s dark glossy green walls were inspired by the tiles of a similar color that flank the fireplace. Bookcases cleverly top the slatted radiator covers Ms. Brooks had built around old radiators on either side of the oversized windows. The marble standing sink, original to the dressing area between the room and the new master bath, was re-topped and the legs re-plated to look refreshed but fitting.  

The floor now boasts a sitting area for the couple to loll and watch TV amidst Rothman’s pre-marriage, mid-century modern collection that includes a Corbu lounge, an Eames chair and classic black surfboard coffee table, things Brooks acknowledges with a laugh, “I didn’t appreciate, but Allen educated me, like I’ve educated him!”

The “sherbet-orange” carpet draws one up the stairs to the third floor and unifies Sophia’s cheerful, lively space whose bathroom, carved out of two small closets, was the impetus for the redesign. The mostly clean white bathroom features an accent wall of turquoise and green glass tile from Waterworks that is inspired, again, by the color of the bedroom’s fireplace tiles.

From her perch at her desk in her new room, a place she “never leaves if I can help it,” Sophia nods to her mother’s great taste.

“I didn’t choose anything, but I like it!” she said, high praise from a teen.

The floor is also home to Rothman’s office, filled with more of his mid-century pieces, including an Eames screen and George Nelson bookcase and desk. The virtually empty room next door stands waiting to be made over into a “project” room.

The warmth and personal touches Brooks has brought to her home is something she tries to bring as well to her clients, in the hope, she says with a shudder, “that people tell you ‘it looks great’ rather than that it looks ‘done.’”

It is, of course, hard to find one’s own passion let alone help someone else find theirs, but Brooks says with excitement, surveying her own 15-month-long labor of love, “that is the challenge, that is the art.”