Back by popular demand, Brownstone Voyeur, a collaboration between casaCARA and OTBKB. For more pictures and text go to CasaCARA.

THIS APARTMENT IS REALLY SMALL. If you dance like a dervish, I wouldn’t recommend doing it in Jane Rosenbaum’s apartment.

Just two rooms totaling 375 square feet in a pre-war State Street rental building, it’s nevertheless got a ton of charm and some good DIY ideas, yours for the copying. Such as:

• Limited color palette — white and periwinkle blue –
  keeps the tiny space from looking too busy. (This takes discipline! I
  intended to use only blue and white in my Springs cottage, but keep
  bringing in things that are red, brown, green, orange…)
• Secondhand furnishings were all painted periwinkle to unify them.
• Round table folds, below, to store against a wall. Open, it seats six for dinner.

• There’s a Murphy bed, below, behind a white curtain in the living room (and you thought they were only in Marx Brothers movies!)

• Salvaged chandelier in the living room is painted white and used with candles. Bookshelf up high makes use of every inch.

Moving on to the only other room, the kitchen:

• Galvanized buckets organize utensils, below.

• The cabinets are painted with chalkboard paint; Jane uses them to display the menu for dinner parties.

BROWNSTONE VOYEUR is a joint project of casaCARA and OTBKB. The series, which has been a regular Thursday feature on both sites, is
going on hiatus for the summer. This is the last installment of the
season; look for it to return in the fall.

A 20-FOOT-WIDE BROWNSTONE in Clinton Hill, replete with 1870s detail
— wide moldings, a flat arch opening between the front and rear
parlors, a bay window at the rear — is the perhaps unlikely showcase for a locally acquired gallery of very modern paintings, and look how well it works.

The homeowners, Richard Montelione, an attorney, and Jack Esterson,
an architect, enjoy browsing local fairs and shows of student work at
nearby Pratt Institute to add to their collection, which they display
against soft brown walls (Benjamin Moore’s Jamesboro Gold, to be exact), outlined with crisp white moldings.

On the parlor floor, above and below, furniture sources are: white sofa, Room & Board; coffee table, Gueridon;
orange Ellipse chair, Modernica; Danish modern end tables, Horseman
Antiques on Atlantic Avenue; TV credenza, Design Within Reach; white
leather club chairs, Room & Board; round coffee table, ABC Carpet.
The table lamps are Italian, from The End of History in Greenwich Village.

Go to CCasaCARA for more text and pictures. 

BROWNSTONE VOYEUR is a joint project of casaCARA and. OTBKB. Look for it every Thursday on both sites.

THIS HAS BEEN MY comfortable home away
from home for the past two weeks. It’s my dear friend Nancy’s brick row
house in Boerum Hill, and it’s classic.

Built around 1870, the house retains many of those coveted Victorian “details,” including spectacular plaster work in the dining room (painted an historic blue-gray), original pocket doors with etched glass, an over-the-top pier mirror, right, between the front parlor windows, a black marble mantel in Eastlake style, long four-over-four parlor windows, and wood floors so old and thin if they’re sanded one more time they’ll turn to sawdust. For more text and more pictures go to: casaCARA

BROWNSTONE VOYEUR is a joint project of casaCARA and Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn. Look for it every Thursday on both sites.

LAST FALL, an unusual townhouse at 100 Nevins Street went on the market with an asking price of $1.975million. Ambitious, to say the least: it went to contract recently for $1.2million. A couple in the arts with two young sons are the almost-owners. They will use it as a one-family.

It's not your typical brownstone. It took the right people to
appreciate the narrow, stoopless four-story building at the corner of
Pacific Street, with its dramatic, atrium-like living room and sculptural central staircase encased in plaster. There’s an enclosed garden on ground level and a roof terrace above. The 1970s renovation features such period-appropriate details as single-pane windows, curved doors that echo the lines of the stairwell, and the use of materials like mirrored tiles and cork for wall covering.

Nancy McKiernan, the listing agent, staged the place for sale,
and did such a subtle job of it that she fooled me, for one. I assumed
the house was decorated by some hip, tasteful people back in the day
when the original Conran’s aesthetic was at its height.

BROWNSTONE VOYEUR is a joint project of casaCARA and OTBKB.  Look for it every Thursday on both sites.

ROBERT FARRELL, an architect and interior designer, has lived since the mid-1990s in a 600 square foot rental on the ground floor of a Carroll Gardens row house, with lumpy plaster walls and a tiny, tubless bathroom.

He stays mainly for the garden, a fifty-foot swath of lawn at the end of which he has constructed a romantic outdoor pavilion draped with nylon parachute cloth.

A corrugated plastic roof and waterproof parachute fabric make the garden room usable eight months a year.

Today CasaCARA discusses the Brooklyn Garden where she "cut her gardening teeth — the 21′x35′ backyard on Verandah Place in Cobble Hill where we lived for twenty years." Here's an excerpt. Lots more text and pictures at CC.

A couple of the principles that served me well:

BROWNSTONE VOYEUR is a joint project of OTBKB and CasaCARA taking you behind the facades of local homes to see how people really live in New York’s hippest borough.

IF YOU MISSED last spring’s Boerum Hill House and Garden Tour, here’s your chance to peek inside the tour’s best proof that a historic home can be lived in by a young family in a fresh and modern way.

When Aimee Landwehr and Keats Aiken, who now have a 7-month-old son, Cooper, bought the 1870 house in 2006, its plaster moldings, ceiling medallions, etched glass doors, and other elaborate Rococo Revival details were remarkably intact (the house had been a single-family all along).

But the kitchen was a dated disaster. Mary Aiken, a Seattle-based kitchen designer who also happens to be the homeowner’s mother, conceived an up-to-the-minute super-kitchen with a French farmhouse feel. For more pix and text go to CasaCARA.

Brownstone Voyeur is a joint project of casaCARA and Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn. This is a regular Thursday series walking you through brownstones, brick row houses, pre-war apartments, Victorians, carriage houses, lofts, and other Brooklyn abodes to see the colorful, creative, clever, cost-conscious ways people really live in New York City’s hippest borough.
Go to CasaCARA for more pictures and text.

TODAY we’re peeking into the c.1904 bowfront brownstone French-born interior designer Caroline Beaupere shares with her husband, photographer Matt Arnold, in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens.

They bought the house in 2005, added a new kitchen and two new bathrooms, and brought all the original woodwork (of which there is plenty) back to life by stripping off dozens of coats of old stain.

Caroline
worked with designer Philippe Starck on the avant garde Hudson Hotel in
the Manhattan’s West 50s, and has just finished decorating the
Presidential suite at the New York Grand Hyatt, but the bulk of her
studio’s work is residential.

Caroline’s style is eclectic, a bit exotic, and most UNexpected, but grounded in the classics. There’s a free flow between modern and traditional. Colors are rich and deep. Accessories tend toward the ethnic. Bold ceiling fixtures dominate each room.

Brownstone Voyeur, a  regular Thursday feature on OTBKB (in collaboration with fellow blogger, CasaCARA), will
take you behind those pretty facades to see what you’ve strained to
glimpse through windows in the past (admit it, you have).

We’ll walk you through the interiors and gardens of brownstones,
brick row houses, pre-war apartments, detached Victorians, carriage
houses, lofts, and other Brooklyn abodes to see the colorful, creative,
clever, cost-conscious ways people really live in New York City’s
hippest borough.

This week we take you behind the facade of a limestone townhouse in Prospect Heights owned by interior designer Caroline Beaupere, full of rich color and unexpected elements.

Today on CasaCARA: Pictures and text about a healing garden in a Brooklyn Heights backyard that was once a dog run, with a broken stone patio and a canopy of ailanthus trees.

Now, with the help of garden designer Nigel Rollings, who teaches the popular Urban Garden Design course at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, it’s a verdant oasis on several levels, with one bold, theatrical stroke: a circular wall fountain.

And look out for Brookyn Voyeur every Thursday, a joint project of OTBKB and CasaCARA.

The property consisted of three lots when DK bought it in 1990: a three-story, 1,800-square-foot building that was a tack house before the Civil War; a one-story structure, originally a stable, now occupied by Olea, a Mediterranean restaurant;
and a vacant lot in between, on which DK built a wooden extension with
a new kitchen and side porch, “grafted on”  to the original brick
house, and created an enclosed garden with a flagstone patio.

DK bought the property in 1990 and did a top-to-bottom renovation in 2002-4. She added the front porch and opened up the second floor as a loftlike bedroom/study. The renovation exposed original brick and ceiling beams,
which she painted white, and she retained later 19th century additions,
including wainscoting and staircases. The furnishings are country-ish,
bought mostly at auction in Vermont.

Today in CasaCARA, some lovely picture of brownstones of color: Here's just a tiny excerpt. Go to CC for more.

"Here’s to the rare, vividly painted facade. These
happen, mostly where a building was painted before and the maintenance
solution going forward is either to strip or re-paint. Re-painting is
less messy, less costly, and brings a welcome dose of color to our
streets."

Bklyn Design 2009 has just announced its 7th annual all-star lineup which features 45
of Brooklyn's top designers!