It was love, not desperation, that inspired Anne Wootton and Teddy Rankin-Parker, a couple relocating to Brooklyn with their two young children, to buy the first property they saw there.
The 14-foot-wide rowhouse in Clinton Hill, which dated to 1899, had many Gilded Age bona fides bespeaking the property’s age: arched room entrances, plaster walls with cracks, a staircase with a thick wooden banister that terminated in a burnished brass finial.
And then there was the backyard. The family had recently lived in Northern California, with its low-key spaciousness. “Knowing we would have a small outdoor oasis was crucial,” said Mr. Rankin-Parker, 39, who is a professional cellist and a psychotherapist.
The couple bought the house in June 2020 and moved in just before Labor Day. Shortly after that, they reached out to Salty Labs, a Brooklyn design collective, to embark on renovations.
Founded in 2011 by Jonsara Ruth, Salty Labs specializes in the use of materials that support human and environmental health. Ms. Ruth is also the co-founder, along with Alison Mears, of the Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons School of Design, which researches healthy building and decorating materials and provides information to professionals and the public.
“Both of us come from a kind of artful background professionally,” Mr. Rankin-Parker said of himself and his wife. (Ms. Wootton, 38, started a podcast archiving company, which she later sold to Apple; she now works for the tech giant.) “When I read Jonsara’s profile, there were these associations with an incredible aesthetic sensibility,” he said, “but also an ethical stance in how renovation could be something so much more than just design.”
In those vertiginous early months of the pandemic, little physical work could be accomplished, but the delay, from their first contact to the beginning of in-person meetings and work, gave the designers and clients time to deepen their mutual understanding.
The conversations, which extended over months of virtual meetings, began with a questionnaire that Ms. Ruth and her collaborator Helen Quinn sent the couple inquiring about their food, artistic, literary and travel preferences and their earliest sensory memories.
“Is there a scent that inspires you? Quiets you? Energizes you?” the questionnaire asked. “If your home was able to speak, what would it say to a guest as they enter?”
After listening to the couple’s favorite musical compositions, which included Bach’s Cello Suite No. 6, “Peace Piece” by the jazz pianist Bill Evans and “Patchwork” by the electronic music composer Laurie Spiegel, the designers visualized what that music felt like “and then threw it back to them,” Ms. Ruth said.
They set the music to slide shows, asking the clients to choose those that resonated most and using the responses to devise intuitive room schemes. Ms. Ruth said she was particularly inspired by kora music from Mali in designing the kitchen, with its cheerful yellow painted wall and cabinet motifs, its vibrant floor pattern and its striped linen pillows.
Overall, Salty Labs proposed — and the homeowners signed onto — a playful design aesthetic that was also functional for a family. This meant retaining eccentric details of the property like squeaky floors.
Almost all the materials introduced were sustainable, repurposed or nontoxic, including formaldehyde-free plywood. The mahogany flooring in the living room came from a gutted Park Avenue apartment. To keep the charming creaks, the floorboards were nailed, rather than glued with an off-gassing adhesive, and sealed with a water-based finish. In the kitchen, the island top is cork, a material that is not only regenerated relatively quickly, but also resists dust, pet dander and other allergens.
The front parlor and kitchen walls were coated in two layers: The base layer is diatomaceous earth, derived from a sedentary rock composed of the fossilized remains of plankton or green algae. The particles are porous, allowing the material to hold and release moisture from the air. (It also absorbs airborne toxins, including formaldehyde).
The top layer is breathable lime plaster. Together, the layers pull in the moisture from the air, including that which comes from people’s bodies. In the humidity of a New York City summer, a space featuring surfaces treated with this combination feels cooler and dryer.
Lime plaster is far better for the body than most paint, Ms. Ruth said. “The paint we all use is a soup of polymers and synthetic chemicals. All that chemistry affects human health and the environment — it’s horrendous.”
She also noted that paint, which often contains synthetic latex, is responsible for half of the microplastics in the ocean. Even paints with low or nonexistent levels of volatile organic compounds (compounds emitted as gases, which can have adverse health effects) can still have icky chemicals, like surfactants and fungicides, she said.
Though the Clinton Hill house’s double-layer wall treatment was tricky enough to warrant the services of a specialist plasterer named Michael O’Connor, the designers specified more user-friendly finishes on other walls that were easily applied with a brush. These included lime wash — a relative of lime plaster — and Alkemis, a brand of mineral-based paint that was formulated to improve air quality and is available in a range of earthy colors.
“It felt pretty early on like we weren’t just designing a space but making choices together to bring forth an atmosphere that felt balanced and nourishing,” Mr. Rankin-Parker said.
A calm, fresh feeling was introduced on both macro and micro levels. The couple wanted an indoor-outdoor area with something of the ambience of their California backyard. So Salty Labs extended the kitchen floor out to the backyard deck to create a treehouse-like room. As luck would have it, it overlooked a redwood.
“It is technically Metasequoia glyptostroboides, a deciduous conifer and a cousin of the coastal redwood,” Mr. Rankin-Parker said of the tree. “It’s not native to Brooklyn, but we found a local newsletter from the 1980s mentioning the previous owner, a passionate gardener, planting it back there.”
The designers customized nooks and corners for the children, Elio, 6, and Roslyn, 3. They created a bench and bookshelf in the kitchen for projects and art supplies, and a tiny felted desk drawer in the living area for precious keepsakes. A drawing Ms. Quinn, who worked with Ms. Ruth on the project, did from a series called “Circus Rorschach” was blown up and turned into wallpaper for a small bathroom off the staircase between the first and second floors.
“Elio turned to me when we were discovering all of these surprises,” Ms. Wootton recounted, “and said, ‘Mommy, how do they know us?’”
Despite the ferocious commitment to healthy materials, some concessions had to be made. The kitchen floors, for example, are a cement tile, a material that is heavily implicated in climate change because of the amount of carbon dioxide released in its production.
“On the positive side, they don’t off-gas harmful chemicals the way some flooring does, and they hold heat and cooling well, making the kitchen more comfortable year-round,” Ms. Ruth noted about the tiles.
Besides, the family wanted a colorful floor that was washable and could extend outside, so wood was impractical. And the cement tiles had a handmade, irregular quality that Salty Labs sought.
“Every single thing was considered 5,000 times,” Ms. Ruth said. “You weigh the impacts. It’s the best of what we can do — and it’s pretty damn good.”
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