Brownstoner’s Top 10 Insiders of 2024

Each week Brownstoner’s Cara Greenberg brings us an inspirational look at interior design and renovation in homes across the borough, from prewar apartments to brownstones. Every Insider column offers a tour of a finished project with details on layout decisions, finishes, and decoration.

Below, click through to find the 10 most popular Insider columns of 2024 and see if your favorite made the list.

10. The Insider: Gut Reno Recasts Brooklyn Heights Apartment as Luxe, Meticulously Detailed Cocoon

When architects Andrea Fisk and Jess Hinshaw of Boerum Hill-based Shapeless Studio first met their new client, a woman who had just purchased a one-bedroom apartment with a lovely view of treetops and church steeples in a Brooklyn Heights World War II-era co-op building, she used the phrase “jewel box” to describe the feeling she was after.

As Fisk unpacked the term, “She wanted a space that was well considered, where each corner of the apartment had something unique, with furnishings and design objects chosen very thoughtfully.” And plenty of storage, especially for books.

9. The Insider: Park Slope Reno Yields Airy, Clutter-Free Apartment

Twelve years after the first renovation of their 950-square-foot apartment in a prewar walk-up, a design-conscious couple called on the same architect to execute a second, more comprehensive one. With half a dozen south-facing windows and a choice location near the park, they had every intention of staying put, but wanted to refine and upgrade the design of their space.

The apartment, originally two bedrooms, has an airy open plan setup, with one very large bedroom also used as a home office. “We basically rebuilt the interior,” said Tana Nesbitt-Hayes, a former Floridian who relocated her architecture practice, Studio 8, to New York City in 2010. “When we started, the apartment had maybe five different ceiling heights. There were dropped ceilings for reasons we couldn’t understand. I wanted full-height pivot doors, and the only way to achieve that is to have level ceilings and floors. We reframed the ceiling and raised the floor in places,” resulting in a uniform and still generous 9-foot ceiling height throughout.

8. The Insider: Park Slope Townhouse Redo Adds Custom Aquarium, Rooftop Sauna

The top-to-bottom renovation of a young family’s late 19th century row house began with a long search for the right property.

The would-be homeowners looked at a lot of houses before deciding on this one, said Scott Kunstadt, lead architect on the ambitious project for The Brooklyn Studio, which has specialized in townhouse renovations since the 1990s. Brendan Coburn, FAIA, was the partner in charge.

7. The Insider: Full-on Cobble Hill Townhouse Gut Transforms Unfinished Into Impeccable

When Michael Ingui, Amy Failla and Joey Chemello of the illustrious architectural firm Baxt Ingui first laid eyes on what would become their new project, the four-story brick row house was, quite simply, “a mess,” Ingui said. Their clients, a couple with two, then three, small children, had recently purchased it in a state of unfinished renovation. “A lot of detail had been removed,” Ingui recalled, “and the second floor was completely gutted down to the joists, with no floor and no sheetrock.”

Baxt Ingui, a 40-year-old firm with offices in lower Manhattan, took on the project as a full-scale gut. “We kept whatever structure we could, replaced the cellar slab, took down an old rear addition that wasn’t structurally sound and built a new one in its existing location” — full width on the garden level and partial width on the parlor floor.

6. The Insider: Curved Shapes, Playful Furnishings Rule in Gut Reno of Boerum Hill Townhouse

Quite a few 19th century row houses have coveted pairs of arched doors at the entry. Alexandra Barker, founder of Gowanus-based Barker Associates Architecture Office, took this classic motif and ran with it, creating arched openings between rooms, along with numerous other curved details, in the gut renovation of a four-story townhouse for venturesome clients.

“Everything had to be redone,” Barker said, from all-new mechanicals, kitchen, baths, and floors to creating new moldings.

5. The Insider: Young Designer Uses His Brooklyn Heights Apartment as a Laboratory for Ideas

Not long after Peter Dolkas, an interior designer originally from the Bay Area, came to New York with “not much of anything except dishes,” he put down local roots in a five-story 1890s apartment building near the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, converted to condos in the late 20th century. Though he has since moved on to another Brooklyn neighborhood, he thinks of this earlier venue as “a bit of a laboratory.”

Dolkas partners with Michelle Ficker in the Dumbo-based Studio Dorion, a boutique design firm currently working on a Park Slope brownstone, a NoHo loft and projects outside the city. Their tiny, innovative  bedroom at the Brooklyn Heights Designer Showhouse last September deployed humble materials like pegboard and chino cotton fabric in elegant fashion.

4. The Insider: Sweeping Reno Touches Every Floor of Brooklyn Heights Townhouse

The chief driving factor behind the full-on renovation of this mid-19th century brick townhouse was the inadequate existing kitchen, located in a narrow wood addition across the back of the parlor floor and lacking a proper connection to the rear yard. But there were plenty of other changes the new homeowners, parents of two boys, wanted to make, including the creation of a “kid zone” on the garden level.

Ingui Architecture, which has renovated more than a score of Brooklyn townhouses, accepted the mission. Amy Failla was the architect of record on the project, with the involvement of Michael Ingui, the firm’s president.

3. The Insider: Childhood Occupant of Heights Brownstone Revives It With TLC

Growing up in a landmarked brownstone in New York’s first historic district, you can’t help but have a sentimental attachment to the place. When a client of architect Sonya Lee inherited the five-story building, he decided to revamp the garden-parlor duplex — his childhood home in the 1970s — with the kind of loving attention only he could bring to it, along with a bit of his late mom’s artistic bent.

“It’s an incredibly grand space,” said Lee, whose portfolio ranges from New York City townhouses to a mid-century modern residence in the hills above L.A. “But there was a Home Depot kitchen from the ’80s, with a 9-foot-tall behemoth cabinet between the kitchen and dining room that blocked the view of a stained glass window and that beautiful ceiling.”

2. The Insider: South Slope Row House Reno Captures Zeitgeist

What does it take to transform a fairly intact three-story vintage row house into a super-stylish family home for the 21st century? More than one might think, even when the general arrangement of spaces remains essentially as it was back in the day. Gowanus-based architect Jeff Etelamaki of Etelamaki Architecture, who took on the renovation for new homeowners, called it a “not-quite-gut of the two upper floors and a fix-up of the garden floor,” undertaken to comport with his client’s cohesive vision of the final product.

“The client had a very strong idea of what she wanted,” Etelamaki said, meaning white rooms, dark materials, steel-and-glass walls, and extensive use of marble. The unified, luxurious, but not ostentatious look was inspired by the influencer Athena Calderone, whose web-based brand, Eyeswoon, has vast popular appeal.

1. The Insider: Vibrant Color and a ’70s Vibe Personalize a Family’s Fort Greene Brownstone

Quite often, interior designers present their clients with imaginative layouts and bold color schemes, only to be asked to please dial things back a bit. Not the case in this generously proportioned brownstone, where Jennifer Morris of Park Slope-based JMorris Design had what she called a “fantastic collaborative experience” with trusting and enthusiastic repeat clients. “I was allowed to flex my muscles here. It was a treat,” she said. “Instead of asking me to peel it back, they were like, “‘And…?’”

The result is a vivid, art-filled interior that celebrates the homeowners’ African-American heritage. Using work by local artists and small businesses was important to both Morris and her clients. “A home renovation is an economy,” the designer said. “We directed money in specific, strategic ways.”

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