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From Lauren's Desk

The last layer: a historic townhouse in Brooklyn

09/20/26

This 1870s Park Slope brownstone, rebuilt to passive house standard with Frances Mildred and recently featured in The New York Times, is a clear example of the kind of work Lauren does most often: not designing a house, but figuring out what it needs once the architecture has found its feet. 

When styling a house with an interior designer, I'm always working to enhance what's already there and execute their vision rather than impose my own. That starts with really looking: noting what pieces are missing, what feels extraneous or out of place, and where the eye needs somewhere to land or rest.

From there, it's a matter of bringing it all together through the placement of objects, flowers, and other small elements, layering things in with intention rather than simply filling space. It's the combination of these decisions, made one at a time, that ultimately helps a home feel complete. Good styling should be almost invisible: the house should look like no one touched it at all, even though someone touched everything.

This house, designed in collaboration with Frances Mildred, is a good example of that in practice. The owners fell for an 1870s Park Slope brownstone in rough shape: ceilings crumbling, walls in ruins, but the moldings, the marble fireplaces, the curling stairwell handrail still holding their ground underneath it all. Somewhere along the way, a previous owner had also papered several rooms in dense, saturated florals, and the couple chose to keep some of that rather than sand it flat.

Frances Mildred took on the architecture, stripping the house to its shell and rebuilding it to passive house standard, a decision made almost entirely in service of function rather than appearance, then bringing it back together around the details that had earned their keep. The kitchen became one long room organized around a single table, a piece of furniture doing the job of two rooms at once rather than a house doing the job of separating them. Upstairs, one room kept its full wallpaper and settled into use as a study, evidence that performance and personality aren't actually opposites, whatever renovation culture tends to imply.

My part came after all of that. Not to add, mostly, but to notice what the house was already asking for, room by room, and to leave alone what didn't need touching.

You can read the full story of the project in The New York Times, written by Tim McKeough with photography by Seth Caplan. 

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