Catherine Weinstock Thoughtfully Updates an Art-Filled Brooklyn Townhouse
The CW Design founder honors historic details while introducing unexpected upgrades like a third-floor kitchen—and makes room for an eclectic collection of contemporary Pakistani art
Whenever Catherine Weinstock embarks on a project, she invokes the four words that have driven her interior design philosophy for the last 25 years: engagement, balance, comfort, and user-friendliness. So when a client, who traded a loft in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood for a Federal-style brick townhouse across the river in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, asked the native New Yorker to work with her, Weinstock began with her bywords. “I needed to modernize it without robbing it of its original character,” the CW Design founder tells Galerie.
Tin ceilings, marble mantels, an original mahogany banister, pine stairs—the house boasted enough period details to carry the updates the client wanted. “I honored the origins of the house in the living room, library, and hallway, and updated the kitchen and bathroom, the harder-working spaces in the house,” Weinstock says. A redesign of the labyrinthine interior rewarded her client with two of the most coveted features of city living: light and space. “These houses, most of which were built in the late 19th century, are configured in such a way that light is not paramount because domestic life was all about modesty in Victorian times,” Weinstock says. Indeed, people shrouded their homes in the same way they dressed themselves: Heavy, floor-to-ceiling draperies were the norm.
The home’s only floor-to-ceiling anything now is in the garden-level kitchen, a 10-square-foot addition Weinstock designed with a wall of windows that blur the line between indoors and out. “This is the room where the client spends much of her time. She’s a passionate cook and loves to entertain,” she says. For a casual get-together with a few friends, an asymmetrical island seats four. A proper dinner party is also possible—with a front-row seat to the cooking and a view to the backyard. “This is where my focus on function really peaked,” says Weinstock, who went for sturdy appliances and lots of storage, plus a workhorse laundry room. “This isn’t a pretentious kitchen.”
Elsewhere, the client’s considerable art collection ticks the engagement box. “She traveled to Pakistan more than two decades ago, discovered a compelling art scene there, and has been enamored of it ever since, much of it chosen by gut, which has worked out quite nicely,” says Weinstock. Simeen Farhat’s Are there Birds in Paradise, a pigmented and cast polyurethane and resin sculpture, hangs over the mantel in the living room, where Frank Gehry’s Wiggle cardboard chair and Pierre Jeanneret’s Scissor chair sidle up to Stefan Rurak’s Action series low table. Sajjad Nawaz’s Cloudscape and Rabia Farooqui’s I spot an inconvenience flank the fireplace.
On the third floor, Weinstock’s principles mingle seamlessly. Not a fan of en suite bathrooms—they eliminate walls, which, for art collectors, are at a premium—she convinced her client to trade three bedrooms and a tiny bath for two spacious bedrooms and a luxurious bath. Custom skylights flood the once-cavernous spaces with light, and the art demands that one stops and engages. Shiblee Muneer’s The ID Splash 06 invites pause on the stairwell landing, while Hassan Kausar’s digitally manipulated photo of men at prayer at the Wazir Khan Mosque stretches across the wall by the banister, a perfect viewing platform. It’s all so well conceived, but perhaps no design move is more considered than the installation of a kitchen on the third floor. Because, Weinstock asks, “Who wants to schlepp down two flights for their morning cup of coffee?”
