While many New Yorkers were busy leaving the city at the beginning of the pandemic, Hallie Morrison and Seth Frader-Thompson did the opposite: They doubled down on urban living by buying a townhouse in Brooklyn.
“A co-worker said, ‘What, are you crazy? Nobody’s buying real estate right now,’” said Mr. Frader-Thompson, 44, the chief executive of EnergyHub, a company focused on smart-grid solutions. “I was like, ‘That’s why we’re buying.’”
At the time, the couple lived in a two-bedroom co-op apartment in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, with Mr. Frader-Thompson’s son from a previous marriage, Sam, now 14. They had already been looking for more space, but were discouraged by a mix of tight inventory, apartments with high common charges and bidding wars on townhouses.
“We liked the neighborhood and were looking for possibilities,” said Ms. Morrison, 39, a landscape architect at Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects.
When they first saw a fixer-upper brownstone from the late 19th century just a couple of blocks away in Fort Greene, it was already in contract. But after that deal fell apart as the pandemic set in, the seller offered it to Ms. Morrison and Mr. Frader-Thompson. They jumped at the opportunity and closed in May 2020 for $2.1 million.
Stuck at home, the family needed additional space more than ever, but the brownstone wasn’t move-in ready. “The interior had been split up into four apartments,” Mr. Frader-Thompson said. Much of the original plaster and woodwork had been stripped out. Even the facade, which once matched its neighbors, had been replaced.
Wanting to give the building a complete refresh and reorganization, they hired the Manhattan-based architect Jane Kim. “This project saved my office, because all my other projects were shut down,” Ms. Kim said. “We went there in masks, with nobody on the subways, and started.”
Over the following months, Ms. Kim collaborated with Ms. Morrison and Mr. Frader-Thompson on plans for a 2,160-square-foot family home on the top three floors of the brownstone, with a 720-square-foot rental apartment on the garden level.
To restore the exterior of the building, which is in a historic district, Ms. Kim directed contractors to take precise measurements from the neighboring brownstone and to recreate the pediments above windows and ornate detailing that had once been there.
Inside, she took down numerous walls to make the layout as open as possible. But rather than demolish everything, she took pains to preserve the few original details that remained. That included the original wood trim and shutters on the windows, and the banister and newel post, where contractors peeled away decades of old paint before refinishing the wood.
On the parlor level, Ms. Kim created a living and dining room open to the kitchen. To anchor the living room, she designed a muscular Calacatta Capraia marble mantel for the fireplace, then added contemporary light fixtures from local companies such as Apparatus, Allied Maker and Workstead.
To animate the powder room, Ms. Morrison and Mr. Frader-Thompson enlisted an artist friend, Mark Joshua Epstein, to paint the walls with a pink-and-aqua mural.
At the back of the kitchen, the home terminates at a windowed wall of black-painted steel and glass, with a door opening to a new deck. Beyond, Ms. Morrison designed a garden with space to experiment with perennial plantings, a concrete-and-gravel dining area and numerous columnar hornbeam trees for privacy.
Upstairs, on the second floor, Ms. Kim devised a primary suite with pocket doors between a bedroom, walk-in closet, bathroom and home office, allowing for an open view from the front to the back of the building. On the top floor, she added a family room and a bedroom for Sam.
“We were trying to make the top floor a more casual place to hang out,” Ms. Kim said, “and somewhere their son could entertain separately from the adult space downstairs.”
It took months to get the various approvals they needed from city officials, Ms. Kim said, as everyone grappled with the move to remote work, but the general contracting company Park Slope Painting was able to begin construction in June 2021. The home was complete one year later, at a cost of about $1.5 million.
Since then, the family has been gradually filling their new space with furniture, accessories and keepsakes including shells, sticks and animal bones that Ms. Morrison collects during their travels. Special pieces include chairs that her father, Andrew Morrison, a furniture designer who died in 2021, created with Bruce Hannah for Knoll (one of which, the Morrison Hannah chair, the company is reintroducing this month), and drawings by her artist mother, Geraldine Morrison.
Now that they’ve settled in, “the basic rhythm of life remains unchanged” from before the pandemic, Mr. Frader-Thompson said, but they have more space to focus on building an even greater sense of community.
“This is a good place for big and small gatherings,” he said. “There can be a pack of teenagers up on the third floor and adults down on the parlor floor at the same time. It’s worked out really well for us.”
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