A Brooklyn Home for a Growing Creative Family

Over the past 12 years of blogging, there have been a handful of homes that grabbed me from the moment I saw them. Usually these homes have a wealth of color and pattern or incredible historic and architectural details. Sometimes they’re filled with a family that exudes so much love that I want to sneak over for dinner just to bask in all that warmth and happiness. This Brooklyn home has all of those qualities in spades.

Writer Rumaan Alam and photographer David Land share this beautiful Crown Heights home in Brooklyn, NY with their sons, Simon, 7, and Xavier, 4. After outgrowing their previous home in Fort Greene, Rumaan and David dreamed of finding a place with outdoor space in a neighborhood that felt like “a cross section of New York,” with all different types of people. “One where a family that looks like ours would feel at home,” Rumaan shares.

Because their family includes two growing boys, David and Rumaan wanted their decorating style to accommodate their sons’ ever-changing needs and collection of toys. “Things are always shifting, but that’s how a house should be: dynamic, not fixed,” Rumaan offers.

Constant redecorators and re-arrangers, David and Rumaan like to mix together pieces from their travels and personal collections (everything from old magazines and books to vintage jigsaw puzzles) with things they’ve inherited from family. And despite the home’s staircase not being wide enough for furniture to pass through to the upstairs (the mattresses had to be sent up through a window!), they were able to get all of their favorite pieces inside and at home.

Rumaan and David describe their home as, “short on light and heavy on dark wood finishes,” so they counteracted the visual weight with lots of color and bright patterns. They find that the “visual busy-ness” actually disguises the jumble of toys that is often strewn about.

What shines through most of all in this space is a clearly abundant sense of joy, excitement, action and love. Rumaan and David have found a way to combine their practical needs as a family of four with their incredible collection of artwork and treasured objects. The result is a home that we’d all be lucky to live in. Thank you to David, Rumaan, Simon and Xavier for sharing their remarkable home with us today.

Photographs by David Land. Styling by Kate Jordan. 

*Rumaan has a fantastic new novel out this summer called Rich & Pretty. I read it on vacation last month and loved every page. Click here to check it out!

Additional Resources:

Living room gallery wall, from top right:

• Vintage botanical print that belonged to David’s paternal grandfather.
• The five horizontal hand paintings on tin are made to decorate rickshaws, and bought in Bangladesh.
• The two needlepoint dancers are vintage, found in Florida.
• The oil painting is a self portrait by David’s grandfather. The bird print belonged to him as well.
• The photograph in the gold frame is by Matthew Barney; it’s a menu from the now shuttered restaurant Chanterelle.
• The blue drawing is by the artist Lori Ellison.
• The vintage painting of Lenin is a factory piece, found at a junk sale in Tblisi, Georgia.
• The uppermost painting is a landscape we bought at the Affordable Art Fair years ago.
• The painting of the hand is by Kip Frace, the square collage and square painting are by Stephanie Snider.
• The vintage watercolor is an original illustration from a textbook of Indian regimental uniforms; we have another in the office.
• The peacock painting was purchased on the side of the road in Bharatpur, India.
• The vintage photograph is from eBay.
• The anatomical illustration of a rooster is in Arabic, and found at Deyrolle, in Paris.
• The oil portraits of the boys were found on eBay.
• The amateur painting of Martin Luther King was found on eBay.

from Design*Sponge http://www.designsponge.com/2016/08/a-brooklyn-home-for-a-growing-creative-family.html

from Home Improvment http://notelocreesnitu.tumblr.com/post/149653617849