The Federal-style brick townhouse retains its period details. Photo: Bruce Buck
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.
A brass chair by Lionel Jadot sits beneath a pair of paintings by Adnan Ali Manganhar that satirize the U.S. Dollar. Photo: Bruce Buck
Above a 1940s cerused oak sideboard hangs a 19th-century Pichawai, an Indian painting on cloth. Photo: Bruce Buck
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.”
Ceiling-height industrial shelving houses a collection of photographs, artifacts, and keepsakes in the library, where a sectional upholstered in African mudcloth fabric is perched atop a custom wool and silk rug. Photo: Bruce Buck
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.
Positioned close to the skylight on the staircase wall, a digitally manipulated mirrored image by British-Pakistani photographer Hassan Kausar captures people at prayer at the Wazir Khan Mosque in Lahore. Photo: Bruce Buck
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?”
A graphite drawing of clouds by Sajjad Nawaz sits above a mint green plaster console in the living room. Photo: Bruce Buck
The kitchen's dark gray cabinets feature integrated handles and the stainless steel appliances are from Miele and Fisher Paykel. Photo: Bruce Buck
In the primary bedroom, a trio of rare early-19th-century Navajo Yei masks hangs above a custom maple platform bed. Photo: Hanna Grankvist
Beige Turkish limestone clads the primary bathroom, which Weinstock outfitted with Dornbracht fittings. Photo: Bruce Buck
