Interior Design, Residential DesignFlorence LApril 28, 2026Prospoect Lefferts GardensInterior Design, Architecture, New York

BROOKLYN BROWNSTONE RENOVATION || When Bauhaus Modernism Meets a Century-Old New York Home

Interior Design, Residential DesignFlorence LApril 28, 2026Prospoect Lefferts GardensInterior Design, Architecture, New York

When One With_Architecture began working with the owners of a turn-of-the-century brownstone in Brooklyn's Prospect Lefferts Gardens, the conversation started not with floor plans but with paintings; specifically, the vivid geometric abstractions of Hilma af Klint and László Moholy-Nagy.

That starting point was not incidental. The clients, a bicultural American-German family of four, brought with them a genuine connection to the Bauhaus tradition and a desire to weave that modernist sensibility into a home shaped by an entirely different era. Built around 1910, during a period of rapid development that would eventually lead to Prospect Lefferts Gardens being designated a Historic District, the brownstone embodied the craftsmanship and formal character typical of the typology. The design challenge was not to erase that character, but to expand its vocabulary.

A custom timber portal frames the primary bedroom, where circular wall sconces, warm oak panelling, and hand-embroidered textiles express the project's marriage of Bauhaus geometry and personal warmth.

The project unfolded in two phases. The first focused on warmth and livability: upgrading the basement, introducing new fireplaces, establishing a consistent wood-detail language throughout the house, and beginning to integrate the clients' existing furniture and art collection into the home's spatial logic. That collection became generative. The dining room murals and the fireplace designs drew directly from it, giving the renovation an intimacy that purely architectural decisions rarely produce on their own.

*A fluted cylindrical bar cabinet anchors a sun-filled room where original wainscoting and leaded glass meet neon-topped Aalto stools, the tension between heritage and irreverence held in easy balance.*

Phase two turned attention to the home's utility core and central bathrooms, spaces that rarely get the design investment they deserve, yet define the rhythm of daily life more than any living room. Two new bathrooms, a powder room, three skylight updates, and comprehensive HVAC improvements were included in this scope. The result is a home that functions as fluidly as it reads visually.

Lime green mosaic tile covers every surface of one of the home's new bathrooms, a total chromatic commitment that reads as a direct translation of Bauhaus colour theory into a room built for daily use.

Deep teal micro-cement wraps the walls and ceiling of a second bathroom, where a ceiling-mounted globe pendant casts cool, diffused light over a space that balances chromatic boldness with genuine calm.

It is the skylights, however, that most clearly articulate the project's conceptual ambition. Rather than treating them as purely functional apertures, One With_Architecture used the forms and colour language drawn from af Klint and Moholy-Nagy as the basis for their shapes. Circular openings cut cleanly through plaster ceilings, admitting columns of sky that feel less like building features and more like canvases. The oval skylight above the entry vestibule is particularly striking; framed by blue-grey millwork and flooding the space with diffused light, it transforms an otherwise transitional moment into something worth pausing in.

*A hand-painted botanical mural wraps the entry vestibule behind a round timber mirror, birds, berries, and a half-glimpsed rabbit announcing the home's playful sensibility from the moment of arrival.*

Colour throughout the home is handled with similar conviction. The entry vestibule is wrapped in a hand-painted mural of botanicals and creatures, a playful, almost storybook gesture that sets the home's tone. Bathrooms push further: one is clad floor-to-ceiling in lime-green mosaic tile, a total chromatic commitment that reads as both joyful and deliberate. Another bathroom wraps its walls in deep teal micro-cement, a globe pendant casting cool light over a space that feels quietly otherworldly. The powder room takes a different approach entirely, pairing a dramatic veined marble sink with mirrored surrounds and a terracotta-painted niche, the stone's geology meeting its own reflection.

*A red floating shelf, marble-topped coffee table, and loose grid of framed prints give the main living room its composed yet personal register, where art collection and architectural restraint meet.*

The original staircase balustrade, repainted in dusty blue, rises past venetian-plastered walls and a painted folk cabinet, threading the home's historic bones through its newly considered interior language.

Against these more expressive moments, the living spaces hold their composure. The main living room keeps a restrained palette of cream and warm oak, anchored by a red floating shelf and a loose, collected arrangement of furniture and art. The staircase, its balustrade painted a considered dusty blue, becomes a vertical thread connecting the home's historic bones to its newly considered interiors.

What One With_Architecture has produced here is not a renovation that treats the past as a problem or modernism as a solution. It is a home that holds both in genuine dialogue, shaped by a family whose own story sits at the intersection of two cultures and a design tradition that asked, a century ago, what a building could be when beauty and function were no longer treated as separate concerns.