When most designers get a commission to revamp a prewar apartment in New York City, they’ll often start by opening up the floor plan. These historic units, built before WWII, tend to have strong bones and graceful proportions—but their formal layouts can feel more suitable to a bygone era. Their small rooms create clear dividing lines between public and private spaces, and most have galley kitchens that are all but sealed off from the rest of the home. Rare is it that, in the renovation of one of these units, the number of rooms actually increases.
But that’s exactly what happened when Kevin Greenberg of design firm Space Exploration reimagined a roughly 2,000-square-foot residence perched in a Brooklyn high-rise. The building was designed by architect Emery Roth in the late 1920s, around the same time he completed legendary Manhattan buildings The El Dorado and The San Remo, and the units have a classic prewar layout. Greenberg, an expert at crafting refined spaces within historic envelopes, leaned in. “We started out with nine rooms—and now there’s 14,” says Greenberg. “People are usually opening things up, but in fact we made this one more subdivided.”
Greenberg began working on the project in the spring of 2023, when a pair of writers who had moved from California with their two children hired the Brooklyn-based architectural designer to revamp their new home and inject it with moments of surprise and whimsy.