I spy, but with good intent

When Elspeth Benoit and David Bevan were renting an apartment in Brooklyn Heights a few years ago, they would walk their bulldogs by Warren Place in Cobble Hill and dream of what it would be like to live there.

The block-long 1870s development for workers features narrow brick townhouses on both sides of a garden-like courtyard that is closed to cars by iron gates.

“We thought it was this very charming oasis in the city,” said Elspeth, 31, an interior designer. “We’d walk past and kind of spy,” said David, 31, a music writer who was then an editor at Spin magazine. Upon discovering that one of the townhouses was for sale in early 2012, they set up a visit with the real estate agent “almost on a lark,” David said.

But after walking through it, they got serious, even though the home had problems.

“It was just a series of tiny rooms, really dark, and the ceilings were low,” Elspeth said. Less than 11 feet wide inside, the three-storey building offered only about 1,000 square feet – small for a townhouse, but substantially larger than the couple’s 325-square-foot rental.

And it came with a private garden, a parking space and a shed that could be converted into a writer’s studio for David. The couple bought the house for $1.3 million in May of that year and hired Elizabeth Roberts of Ensemble Architecture in Brooklyn to undertake a gut renovation.

The firm, whose work they had seen on the website Remodelista, was experienced at stripped-down townhouse interiors with cleaned-up traditional details.

Let there be light

To open up the rooms and bring in more light, the architects demolished a central staircase that was enclosed by walls and replaced it with an open staircase edged in spindles.

Illumination from an expansive new skylight now floods all three levels. They reclaimed space by stripping away plaster to expose a brick party wall and the original wooden ceiling joists (while concealing electrical wiring by dropping the ceiling between joists in a few select areas). “We took everything off that we could,” Elizabeth said, “to make it as big as we could.”

In keeping with the period, Elspeth sourced vintage pieces like a salvaged bathtub and sink from the Demolition Depot, an antique marble fireplace mantel from Olde Good Things and blue-and-white Portuguese wall tile from Solar Antique Tiles.

She also layered in colourful contemporary touches, including graphic wallpaper by Kelly Wearstler, an angular chandelier by Bec Brittain and a custom sofa with geometrically patterned emerald fabric from Studio Four NYC (which had to be hoisted in through the front window because the home’s entrance is so narrow).

By the time they finished the $550,000 renovation in March, even Elizabeth was surprised by the two-bedroom, two-bathroom home she had wrought. The work “made this house seem much bigger and brighter than I ever thought it would,” she said.

More surprises were to come. Days after moving in, Elspeth confirmed that she was pregnant. And a few months later, David landed a new job at Apple that required the couple to begin splitting time between California and New York. Their daughter, Rhys David, was born in November in Redwood City, California.

Now that their home is complete, the couple have noticed they’re not the only ones who dreamed of living on Warren Place. “We discovered that it’s not uncommon for people to walk through the garden and peer in the windows,” Elspeth said.