There's a Bright, Airy Home Lurking Behind This Industrial Brooklyn Facade

It might not look so fancy from the outside, but through this garage in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, you’ll find a peaceful urban retreat with light streaming in through the private courtyard. We asked design team Bespoke Only, founded by Melissa Lee and Erika Chou, how they turned this former bachelor pad into an urban oasis for a young couple with a budding startup.

Built on the site of a former metal shop, this house was originally designed for Steve Burns, the former Blue's Clues host. “He bought this lot, which used to be a metal shop, and turned it into a courtyard house, which is really unique,” Melissa says. Its newest owners wanted to create a combination live/work space, with room to house their company office, an airy living room to host their employees, and private spaces for them to retreat completely from work.

When Bespoke Only took on the project, there were originally interior windows along the upstairs back wall here, offering a view from the guest bedroom into the main house. Because the new homeowners wanted to be able to entertain their coworkers in their home, they wanted to move the principal bedroom upstairs to that space. “Now those windows are gone, to give a proper separation from the rest of the house,” she says.

Melissa’s team had custom doors made for the principal bedroom closet out of frosted glass, woven cane and stained white oak. “In a tight, small space, I think having a little material that is not so solid helps to keep it airy,” she says. It also gives a nod to the original footprint of the room, Melissa says, to use translucent materials where the bedroom's interior windows used to be.

The feel of boutique hotels in Europe inspired the design of the room, Melissa says. “They’re always really compact, but everything is within reach and when you move around, you don’t really feel the space being small and restricting. Instead, you feel cocooned.” The linen bedsheets are from Cultiver. “We use them in almost every project of ours,” Melissa says. “I like the texture a lot and it adds so much warmth to the bedding.”

Bespoke Only decided to “float” the bed in the middle of the room. On one side, you have the deck, on the other side is the closet, and behind it, there’s a clear walkway to the en suite bathroom. “Every inch here was very much utilized to the max,” Melissa says.

Bespoke Only redesigned the bathroom’s footprint to remove a small closet and provide more floor space. Like the main bedroom, the bathroom’s design also borrows from the feel of a glamorous boutique hotel, using materials and finishes that provide contrast to the home’s industrial feel.

The leathered granite countertop in the principal bathroom is the same stone as the kitchen countertops. “Granite has such a bad rap from the eighties,” Melissa says. “When you think about the new modern luxury, people all want marble or something else. But I feel like granite has made a comeback. It’s so durable and it was well-used for a good reason — it’s heat-resistant and it’s a lot less finicky than marble." Melissa likes this textured leather look "which adds a matte finish to it but somehow still feels kind of rough.”

The marble tiles used for the principal bathroom floor create the optical illusion of three-dimensional boxes, but there isn’t a single square tile here. It’s a historic pattern, Melissa says, and the retro feel provides contrast to the otherwise ultra-modern feel of the house. “It’s all about surprises, right?” Melissa says, speaking of how the home’s façade is industrial, and the living spaces are bright, airy and modern. The bedroom suite is full of retro touches. “At every turn, you get a little bit surprised, and then somehow they all tie together in a very harmonious way.”

The open kitchen and living space is intended to be an entertaining space for the homeowners’ employees. “So we didn’t want it to feel one-hundred percent residential,” Melissa says. “There’s still a little bit of that blurred line between commercial and residential. You want it to feel like a space that you’re comfortable hosting and comfortable hanging out with your colleagues, so a bar seat is kind of an in-between.” The leather seats pictured here are from 1st Dibs, an online marketplace specializing in designer and vintage furniture, decor, watches and jewelry.

Melissa’s team didn’t change the kitchen cabinetry or millwork, she says. The cabinets are made out of white oak with an ebonized stain, and they feature antique brass hardware. “The open shelf is also made out of stone, so it’s almost like an extension of the staircase,” Melissa says, which creates an interesting illusion that the stairs continue and then disappear into thin air.

The chandelier in the living room was custom-made by Coil + Drift, a lighting company based in upstate New York. “They make really intricate pieces that almost look like jewelry,” Melissa says. “It’s so delicate, yet somehow it has a very strong modern sense to it. It’s such a nice complement to the space.” Installing it required a team of several people to set up scaffolding, and Melissa said everyone held their breath while these delicate pieces were installed. In contrast to this ultra-custom, designer piece, the cowhide rug here was sourced from IKEA. “IKEA is always a good place to find basic pieces, and they do basic well,” Melissa says.

Melissa sourced quite a few vintage pieces for this redesign project, and not just because they look amazing. It was also a practical matter. Shipping and production timelines for new pieces have been thrown completely out of whack by the pandemic the last few years, she says, so it’s simply faster and easier to go vintage these days. “We have been telling our clients, to keep your project timeline in check, we have to be thinking more outside the box,” she says. New upholstered pieces might now take 30 weeks or longer, she says. “Do you really want to wait thirty weeks? Or, we can find something beautiful and reupholster it.” Bespoke Only has trusted dealers sourcing pieces as nearby as New York and as far away as Europe, Melissa says.

The fireplace is original to the home, and Melissa says she likes the contrast it provides. “The fireplace is so rustic, and it’s a little worn and seasoned,” she says. “Having that as the backdrop of the really delicate chandelier — it’s just really cool, the juxtaposition between the raw and the refined.”

This powder room is near the entryway from the front door. The sink and reclaimed wooden counter are original to the home, but Melissa and her team changed the mirror and lighting to give the space a softer, warmer feel. “When you have these types of reclaimed woods and this stone sink, without everything else being refined, it will just go really far down that rustic, industrial, commercial, grungy path,” she says. “So, when we incorporate these materials, I think it’s always important to balance it with something else that’s softer and warmer, so then that rawness becomes intentional.”

The couple doesn’t own a car, so they turned their garage into a gym. Melissa said they had the whole space painted dark and installed softer lighting. You can see throughout the house, she says, that little touches in lighting and finishes “can really change the feel of a space. It’s so subtle, but it just directs how you perceive the surroundings.”

This small guest bedroom used to be a storage space, and doesn’t have any windows. It used to have harsh lighting and a concrete floor; it wasn’t an inviting space. So, Melissa’s team leaned into that. “For rooms without natural light, it’s important to embrace it,” Melissa says. “It’s not going to be bright — ever — so the best you can do is make it a cozy space. You come in here to quiet down and to feel like the space is hugging you, not suffocating you.” Her team installed 2700K light bulbs, which cast a warm, amber glow similar to incandescent light bulbs, she says. She suggests looking for this pendant light, or similar styles, at Anthropologie.