Brooklyn Interiors

The renegade design spirit that has turned Brooklyn into a bastion of style.
These days, Brooklyn is more than a place—it’s become a symbol for a whole style of living, one that is rooted in a broad-minded eclecticism and imbued with an aura of authenticity, originality, and independence. It has replaced Manhattan as home to indie fashion designers, filmmakers, artists, writers, actors, and entrepreneurs with trendsetting design sensibilities. Focusing entirely on private homes, this is the first book to get to the heart of the Brooklyn lifestyle.

Profiling homes that exemplify a distinctive perspective, Brooklyn Interiors goes beyond the front doors of the new creative class—inside the borough’s most compelling brownstones, row houses, lofts, condos, carriage houses, and even one houseboat. From Williamsburg and Greenpoint to Carroll Gardens and Park Slope and every neighborhood in between, the connecting thread is a brilliant resourcefulness. There is also an uncanny knack for beautifully reconciling a respect for tradition, an embrace of modernism, and a new love of the handcrafted (one that is broader and more syncretic than what’s become typical of the borough). In the end, the Brooklyn ideal is to carve out one’s own niche within a tightly developed urban environment—thus these examples provide aesthetic lessons for people all over the country.

Kathleen Hackett is a contributing editor at Elle Decor and writes frequently forVeranda, Architectural Digest, InStyle, Country Living, and Martha Stewart Living. She is the coauthor, with her husband, artist Stephen Antonson, ofHome from the Hardware Store and coauthor with her sister Mary Ann Young ofThe Salvage Sisters.