A Brownstone as a Domestic Archive

Family history, architectural memory and contemporary experimentation coexist within an early twentieth-century Brooklyn brownstone in the residential neighbourhood of Prospect Lefferts Gardens: a three-storey, 230-square-metre residence reshaped through the renovation project by O-N Architects.

Designed for a young couple with roots in both Stuttgart and New York, the intervention reorganises the existing interiors while revealing and amplifying the cultural and constructive overlaps embedded within the original house.

Brooklyn Brownstone, a cultural dialogue

The project originates from a parallel between the clients’ backgrounds and the cultural duality that defined early twentieth-century architecture: on one side, the European rationalism of the Bauhaus, openly embracing industrialisation, standardisation and geometric clarity; on the other, the distinctly American domesticity of Brooklyn’s speculative brownstones, built in series yet still tied to an ornamental and handcrafted vision of bourgeois living.

O-N Architects develops the renovation precisely through this divergence, seeking a balance between industrial logic and domestic memory, between serial production and individuality. As studio founders Davis Owen and Irene Chung explain:

«The goal was not to overwrite the house, but to reveal the layered logic already present within it». «In this sense, the renovation is less about contrast and more about alignment. The project does not resolve that tension. It makes it visible».

This research also translates into precise visual and cultural references connected to the European avant-garde of the early twentieth century: artists such as Hilma af Klint and László Moholy-Nagy, for instance, became stylistic inspirations for the new skylights.

Spatial devices between material and colour

The intervention unfolds through carefully calibrated transformations and insertions, where art, joinery and custom-made furnishings become central design tools. In the vestibule, a hand-painted mural intertwines American botanical motifs with the geometries of European modernism.

In the dining room, the Demi-Lune bar cabinet — a semicircular aluminium piece with doors clad in vertical rows of handcrafted metal tubes — fills the void left by a removed fireplace, establishing a dialogue with the room’s architectural vocabulary.

The fireplace in the adjacent living room is reinterpreted as a sculptural volume in hand-modelled plaster; beside it, a red-stained oak casework finished with linseed oil and pigment introduces a bold chromatic accent that guides the perception of space.

Upstairs, colour becomes an atmospheric device. The original staircase, repainted in blue, establishes a chromatic connection between the vestibule, entrance doors and upper bathrooms. The bathrooms themselves are conceived as immersive environments: the Green Bathroom, clad in swimming-pool tiles, takes on a vibrant and playful dimension; the Blue Bathroom, finished in matte Tadelakt plaster and illuminated by a circular porthole skylight, seeks a calm and contemplative atmosphere; a clerestory window connects it to the compact and quiet Red Toilet room, generating subtle chromatic and luminous interactions.

The residence ultimately transforms into a complex narrative device, a system in which every choice celebrates the dual heritage – European and American, industrial and artisanal – belonging both to the house and to its inhabitants.

>>> Discover also the renovation of this house-studio in Laruns, between reuse and recomposition