There was no other way to put it: The house had bad bones. A late-19th-century rowhouse, it contained a hallway to nowhere, a backdoor that opened to empty space above an alley, a staircase that didn’t quite reach the second floor (wooden wedges had been added haphazardly to fill the gaps) and a square tub that resembled a roasting pan in the single bathroom.
There was, at least, a shower, but the new owners, Madelyn and Joseph Brown, needed a wrench to turn it on.
Why did they buy it? The 18-foot-wide house was on Capitol Hill in Washington. It put Mr. Brown, who was working as a Senate legislative assistant at the time, in 2021, within easy distance of his job. And though there were only 855 square feet of floor area, it offered enough room for the couple to start a family.
Thanks to imperfections like exposed wiring, termite damage and a weirdly mirrored basement, it was priced at $775,000 — low by the charming, historic neighborhood’s standards. The Browns beat the competition by offering $819,000 (it was not an all-cash deal) and waiving contingencies.
“We did know, for the most part, what we were walking into,” said Ms. Brown, who works remotely as a sales manager for an information technology consulting company.
Before they closed the deal, however, they called Danielle Connelly, who has been friends with Ms. Brown since they were in elementary school. Ms. Connelly and her husband, Gabriel Gonzalez, run an interior architecture firm in Brooklyn called Evidence of Things.
“It was hard to say, ‘Yeah, go for it,’” Mr. Gonzalez recalled about the designers’ first visit to the property.
Still, he and Ms. Connelly gave the purchase their blessing and much more. They took on the gut renovation of the narrow building, unpacking and rearranging its elements like travelers preparing for a long trip with a carry-on bag.
Working with the Brooklyn-based designer Emma Montgomery in the project’s later stages, they oversaw the house’s return to stability and provided it with rational pathways. In doing so, they found space for a new lower-floor powder room, an upper-floor laundry room and a home office at the top of the reconfigured and no-longer-death-inviting staircase.
“They made phenomenal use of every inch of this home,” Ms. Brown, 35, said. The kitchen island, which backs up to a banquette that seats six (reducing the clutter of chairs), contains storage. What looks like a bookshelf in the foyer turns out, remarkably, to be a coat closet big enough to fit a baby stroller. “Supercute baskets,” as Ms. Brown described them, hold dog toys.
The designers told her and Mr. Brown, 35, who now works as a lobbyist, that they didn’t want them to worry about messy surfaces.
Certain space-consuming features were nonnegotiable.
Ms. Brown explained to the designers that, for the sake of their marriage, the couple needed a king-size bed. But that created a problem. The room was 6 feet 9 inches wide by 9 feet 7 inches deep, excluding the window bay. Where would night tables go? The solution was an asymmetrical wooden headboard that was attached on Ms. Brown’s side to an end table but that narrowed and stretched above the bed, forming a ledge on which Mr. Brown could set his reading materials and water glass.
In this little bedroom, the designers introduced three arches for a monumental touch, while the decorative beams they installed on the first floor restored some of the character that had vanished when the building was subjected to its century of torments.
Every spot of erosion became an opportunity. Faced with the need to replace much of the flooring, the designers used patterned brickwork, a material visible around the neighborhood, to define the entrance area, powder room and kitchen.
The house coheres not just architecturally but also stylistically. Its theme, in tribute to Ms. Brown and Ms. Connelly’s South Florida upbringing, is the Everglades. Tropical references subtly reveal themselves in mossy greenery, an abstract outline of an alligator in the custom living room carpet, a side table with egretlike legs and a palette of dull greens and browns reminiscent of mangroves and brackish water.
“We call it ‘swamp chic,’” Ms. Connelly said, adding that it was also a slight nod to Washington’s humid, mosquito-infested climate and the mire of congressional politics. “But we’d be so glad if someone came up with a better name than that.”
Construction began in 2023 after a few hiccups in finding a reliable contractor and funding the project. Economies were made with low-cost products, like $30 clip-on light shades and bead board from Home Depot, and by hiring fabricators found on Etsy to produce custom designs. The budget for the renovation and décor was about $320,000, Ms. Brown said.
The pace picked up when the Browns learned that they would be expecting a baby in late August 2025.
“It was a hard deadline,” Ms. Connelly recalled.
The Browns’ infant daughter, Campbell, now sleeps in a nursery covered in wallpaper that is hand drawn with herons, waterlilies and Florida panthers. The designers also created a carpet for the room, adapted from a famous illustration in the children’s book “The Little Prince,” with an elephant and a snake.
Ms. Connelly noted that the elephant, as opposed to the snake, didn’t fit the Everglades concept, but she believed that the Little Prince would have liked the room.
“He was a traveler,” she said.
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