When Jessica Sailer and her husband fell for an 1870s Italianate building on a quiet block in Brooklyn Heights, they were willing to endure a number of attendant concessions. Given considerable renovation delays, the couple and their three young children went through a series of small rental apartments and, for a period, lived exclusively on the home’s top floor. There, meals were cooked on a hot plate in the laundry room while Sailer, a jewelry entrepreneur and former fashion editor, who had a broken ankle at the time, would descend four flights of stairs sitting down.
While the couple originally had a minimalist, Parisian vision in mind, after they decided to work with Remy Renzullo—with his own passion for 18th-century houses and layered interiors that look like they’ve been lived-in for generations—there was a shared leap of faith regarding the project’s ultimate direction. The London- and Connecticut-based designer usually avoids relying on visual references, yet in this instance Renzullo felt it might help identify common ground, so he began to pull archival imagery. Whittling away some 70 percent of his research, the trio discovered a shared appreciation for classic architecture and quiet, collected spaces, in the style of Bill Blass, Bruce Budd, Axel Vervoordt, and Rose Tarlow. “This couldn’t be a reflection of how I think a house should look,” Renzullo shares of their process. “It has to be about the client, and their personality has to come through.”
Diving headlong into an endeavor that would eventually stretch to seven years—longer than Renzullo’s recent first-phase update of England’s famed Castle Howard —the designer set about doing what he does best: sourcing. (“I love decorating, but I’m a voracious shopper and my passion is furniture and art,” he explains.) To his delight, the couple seriously considered how they like to live and realized formality was important. Among the first items he purchased for them, at the Paris flea market, was a rare Jansen dining table. “I’m not the kind of parent who’s like, ‘Jump all over the couches,’ ” Sailer says. “The kids have to sit on the furniture properly, take care of things, and they know that I’ll fluff a pillow when they get up.”
After adding on to the rear of the house—Ingui Architecture and American Contractors oversaw the renovation—the parlor floor was divided into three stately entertaining areas: a living room, gallery, and formal dining room (where that Jansen table now stands below a monumental 17th-century Frans Snyders hunting scene). “They want to come home and walk into beautiful rooms that make them feel inspired,” says Renzullo.
Although an air of refinement extends throughout the five-story, five-bedroom abode, certain spaces, such as the garden level, are more laid-back and cozy. There, the family room, with its plush Jacques Adnet daybed is, unlike the pristine enfilade above, intended to be a kid-centric zone. As is the neighboring kitchen, whose palette of black, white, and crimson—courtesy of a car-size La Cornue range Sailer’s husband purchased as a surprise—was inspired by a home they’d seen in Portugal. The backsplash tiles, handmade in Holland, and antique-marble floor offer a lived-in patina alongside pristine white millwork and tidy glass doors that open to the garden. To design the green space, Sailer tapped her friend Nathalie Pierrepont Danilovich, who says she took “cues from French gardens and focused on symmetry and perspective,” making it feel like an extension of the interiors.
Particularly reflective of the garden is the upstairs study, which features one of the home’s few colorful prints, a Braquenié floral, on the drapery, and objects and art spanning 400 years of civilization. “Every house is an evolution,” Renzullo says. “I don’t believe in skewing to one specific time or place.” Inspired by the Grand Tour, an obsession of the designer, the hideaway, where Sailer works on her new high-jewelry brand, LaPietra, is anchored by an 18th-century Roman specimen table, a shield-back chair made for Napoleon Bonaparte, and a relief by Jasper Johns.
That slow, curatorial approach—“it wasn’t mood boards,” Renzullo insists, “we weren’t sitting there with a huge table covered in tear sheets”—is also evident in the bedrooms. In the primary, midcentury Klismos chairs by T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings fit naturally with a pair of circa 1810 Neapolitan marquetry commodes and artworks by Robert Ryman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Andy Warhol. While Sailer had a clear vision for her daughters’ rooms, Renzullo took the reins outfitting her son’s.
“As I never got the opportunity to do a room for myself as a kid, I made it look like how I would’ve wanted my room to look,” he shares, pointing to a four-poster iron bed from England, which he assumed would be met with resistance. “Even if there were a few things you felt skeptical about,” Renzullo says, smiling at his client, “by the time they arrived and were put into context, it all ended up making sense.”
Reflecting on the project, seven years on, Sailer now can’t imagine having hired another designer for the job. “I think it absolutely worked with Remy because we came to him, but he really met us, too—this isn’t a house filled with someone else’s vision,” she says. “Everything in this house feels like us.”
This story appears in the AD100 issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.
