I love small spaces and always have. When I was a child, whenever we moved, I always wanted the smallest room — and this has followed me into adulthood. When I bought my home, I didn’t pick one of the two bedrooms as my room, but rather the small sunroom located off a bedroom. It’s now my son’s room and very much still my favorite room in my home. So it’s no surprise that this featured room speaks to me. Paula Guzman, an interior designer living in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, has been able to turn her 250-square-foot former living room into a beautiful combination of sitting area, home office, and bedroom. In a shared Neo-Grec row house brownstone, built in 1877, Paula and her roommate live on the second and third floors.
Paula is originally from Chicago, but has lived in New York City for the past five years. She discovered her passion for design at a young age working on DIY sewing projects, but it wasn’t until she moved to San Francisco after college that she decided to become an interior designer. She credits the striking and well-preserved Victorian architecture of the city to her obsession with the interiors of old houses. Inspired by a sourcing trip to Turkey, Paula has also cultivated a love for vintage textiles and the juxtaposition of raw and refined materials. This upcoming winter, Paula will be traveling to her parents’ hometown in Mexico to source traditional local textiles and artisan home goods. She plans on launching her own line of artisan-made textiles in the near future.
When Paula felt the pull to move back to back Brooklyn — where she had lived for a short time when she first moved to New York — she started looking for a studio apartment. Her friend sent her a listing to a shared brownstone and insisted that it was worth checking out, even though she wasn’t looking to live with roommates again. “I decided to schedule a visit, and was actually the first person to see the newly available room two months before the posted move-in date,” Paula recalls. “As soon as my now roommate Rachel opened the 9-foot doors and led me up the original wooden staircase, I knew I had stumbled upon something truly special. It’s hard to describe, but the home — like many historic homes — has a certain magical charm to it and a strong sense of time and place. I remember immediately falling in love with all the intact architectural details and how quiet it was compared to all my previous Manhattan apartments. I also loved the fact that Rachel had been renting the duplex apartment from the owners, who lived downstairs with their twin boys, for the past four years so it very much felt like a lived-in home. I think I said ‘I’ll take it’ after my first 10 minutes inside.”
Once she moved in, it took Paula about six months to create the space you see today. With her mother’s help, they were able to first paint the walls with Benjamin Moore Lacey Pearl. “I love the way the color reads mostly as a soft grey, but has hints of pink and purple in the daylight. Adding a fresh coat of paint really helped kicked off the decorating process, and I moved on to furnishings,” Paula shares. She used IKEA’s Stockholm rug as a starting point because she felt that it brought the right amount of drama to help balance the top-heaviness of the plaster crown moldings and dark wood shutters. With these two very bold elements at play, she decided to keep the other shapes very clean and simple, and used pattern and color sparingly. “I did, however, incorporate many whimsical pieces of floral art that I had been collecting over the years, which seemed to organically find their perfect place in this new room.”
By thinking of this space as a studio instead of just a bedroom in an apartment, Paula has given us a beautiful take on how to make a shared space truly your own. I hope you enjoy this peek into her cozy studio! —Erin
Photography by Studio Basel / @studio_basel
Image above: “I used a dramatic black and white striped rug in the bedroom area to balance the heaviness of the plaster crown moldings and dark wood window casings and shutters,” Paula shares.
from Design*Sponge http://www.designsponge.com/2017/11/a-shared-space-in-brooklyn-feels-like-a-standalone-home.html
from Home Improvment http://notelocreesnitu.tumblr.com/post/167454133469
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