Studios TBo and Hovey Design have renovated a townhouse in Brooklyn. The two-story brick townhouse from 1899 has been completely redesigned and extended to allow access to light, and a full-sized addition has been added to the courtyard side.
The customer for this project is real estate specialist Tatyana Kames, who founded her own company in 1992. Her company has a division that specializes in looking for historic buildings that have fallen into disrepair and completely redoing them. Tatiana hired architects Tom Dalmas and Breten Wallizer (TBo) for a major renovation of the house. The building, with its leaking roof, was abandoned and divided into small, poorly renovated apartments. Windows in the old brick walls were enlarged on each floor to create a flowing series of brick arcades between the existing rooms and the new ones.
The new addition is a monolithic box connected to the original brick building. The concrete walls are covered with plaster, and the old brick structure of the arcade is finished with terracotta cement. In the new part, you can see structural fir beams and a skylight that provides light to distant rooms.
The windows are deliberately enlarged to fill the space with light and create a sense of scale and dimension in the rooms, which have become spacious. The new top floor is clad in corten siding. It houses the master bedroom, bathroom, dressing rooms, and living room. Other design features include the restoration of all surviving fireplaces, as well as the restoration of historic doors. The floor is finished with wood, the walls are with diamond plaster, and the large openings of the far facade are framed with fir. In the kitchen, a textured red stone was used to decorate the island, the worktop is made of Rojo Alicante marble, and the cabinets are made of oak.
Hovey Design was responsible for the furnishing and decoration of the house. Its founders are sisters Hollister and Porter Hovey, who managed to gain popularity thanks to their projects in the field of interior scenography and styling. Their style combines basics (such as sofas in white and light-colored upholstery) with vintage Italian and mid-century French pieces bought at auctions.
The sister’s accessories are brought mainly from Mexico City, Los Angeles, and Madrid. Hollister also usually creates paintings for each project. For this interior, the Hovey sisters chose Jay Kim’s ceramic vase, Italian modernist sets, 1940s French oak and wicker dining chairs, 1960s rattan sculpture chairs, Gerrit Rietveld chair (in the nursery), Tito Agnoli chairs (in the kitchen). Designers admit: “We were often lucky with the search for objects. So, just a week before the completion of the project, at one of the auctions, we found a Cesare Lacca bar cart from the 1960s, and it became the final detail.”
