This unique Brooklyn home is quietly intentional, with each room expressing the clients’ personalities in distinct ways. It belongs to a young, creative couple with two small children—he’s a marketing entrepreneur and co-founder of Kin, while she’s the co-founder of a slow fashion boutique called August Market. Both have a strong sense of style and design sensibility, and they reached out to New York architectural firm OA to reimagine their new home.

The living room, dining room, and kitchen all visually recede, acting as a subtle backdrop for the couple’s carefully curated collection of furniture, artwork, and lighting. Conversely, the bathrooms are rich compositions of volume, natural light, and textural materials. The design team tells us more.

Tell us about this home. Where is it located? What do you love most about the area?
This house is over 100 years old and located in the Bed Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York City. The neighborhood is home to thousands of historic rowhouses that maintain many of their original details. Though the neighborhood is changing, the community of family-oriented long-term residents remains strong. Many longtime local businesses reside along newcomers, creating a collection of restaurants, cafes, and stores along leafy streets.  This renovation allows our clients to remain in this house, and therefore remain members of the neighborhood community, for many years to come.

When it came to the renovation, what was your scope of work?
Ultimately, the scope of our work on this project was to show the clients how this house could be reconfigured to be much more in-sync with their everyday lives. In that process, we showed many variations—from the least invasive to the most invasive—and had lots of discussions about the trade-offs involved in doing one versus another. Often clients realize that, if you’re going to take on the rigors of a construction project, it’s better to get done as much as possible in one phase. That was the case with the Quincy House, and it allowed us to completely reorganize the house from top to bottom in a manner that was much more suited to serve this family’s needs for the foreseeable future. This involved everything from shoring up the existing structural problems, providing new doors and windows, reworking the entry sequence into the house, creating an open floor plan on the main level, configuring a guest suite on the garden level, and redoing the kitchen, all bathrooms, and the HVAC system.

For this project, what was the biggest challenge faced?
The biggest challenge we faced was working with the unknowns of redoing a 100-year-old house.  For example, during demolition we learned that many of the structural joists were in bad shape and needed to be either shored or completely replaced.  

Thanks to thoughtful design, bold choices, and deep respect for the home’s history, the Quincy House is now a modern sanctuary rooted in community and creativity.