Before & After: Color Runs Wild in This Once-Beige Clinton Hill Apartment
The Brooklyn home now relishes in a range of blues, greens, and orangey-reds, with terrazzo and tile to spare.
The Brooklyn home now relishes in a range of blues, greens, and orangey-reds, with terrazzo and tile to spare.
When architect Luki Anderson first walks through a potential client’s home, she looks for clues to learn about their aesthetic. By the time she reached the kitchen of this Clinton Hill duplex, the owners’ style had become pretty obvious. "I could see from all their textiles and art that they really like color," she says. "Then in the kitchen, they had painted the cabinets themselves, and put red knobs on to make it a bit more who they were."
Indeed, the owners, a couple with two children, had reached out to Anderson’s firm, Studio Officina, for a functional overhaul—they wanted to expand the kitchen and add a third room to the lower garden level—as well as a much-needed color fix.
After: The Foyer
The home’s color story starts in the entry, with Fireclay three-inch triangle tile in orange-red Ember and Svenskt Tenn Vårklocker wallpaper by Josef Frank.
Hanna Grankvist
"The kitchen was pretty worn out," says Anderson. "They knew for sure that they wanted to renovate it." While these narrow duplex plans frequently place the kitchen at the rear of the house, the owners didn’t want to do that, as they already had a generous living room at the back and liked its size. After working through several layout options, the architect found that the kitchen was too narrow for a central island, yet the distance between the counters was slightly too far.
Her ultimate solution was to install a U-shaped layout on one wall, keeping the sink and stove in place while adding a generous amount of counter space and cabinets via two peninsulas. The opposite wall, which was pushed back to co-opt an unnecessary hallway and streamline the circulation, hosts the pantry cabinets, refrigerator, and a coffee bar niche. "All the tall things are over on one wall, so that when you look through the space, you’re not overwhelmed by cabinetry," says Anderson. "Then the niche is a surprise."
Before: Kitchen
Before: The owners reached out to architect Luki Anderson of Studio Officina Architecture to remodel their 1905 Clinton Hill duplex, starting with the kitchen, which they wanted to expand. In a previous effort to spruce up the space, they painted the cabinets and added colorful knobs.
Courtesy of Studio Officina Architecture
After: Kitchen
The cabinetry on this side of the kitchen is painted Farrow & Ball’s Pea Flower Tea. The floors are large-format tile floors are Riad’s 24x24 Nightfall terrazzo. "It’s great to do a large format tile in a kitchen because you have less grout lines, so less dirt," says Anderson. "It’s also nice because it’s neutral—it’s a warm color that works well with a lot of other colors, but it still has its own personality."
Hanna Grankvist
See the full story on Dwell.com: Before & After: Color Runs Wild in This Once-Beige Clinton Hill Apartment
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