When Barry Bordelon and Jordan Slocum, the Brooklyn-based design duo known as the Brownstone Boys, take on a historic renovation, they unearth stories. For the past six years, the couple has built their reputation on meticulous brownstone restorations that honour the past while making space for modern life — thus far, they’ve completed more than 25 projects across Brooklyn. But when they stepped into a four-storey brownstone on a quiet Bedford-Stuyvesant block, they discovered something that made this project different.
Frank Frances Studio
‘We learned that this property in Bed-Stuy was the original home to one of Brooklyn’s first female developers, Susanna EC Russell,’ Slocum says. ‘And that’s where me and Barry really got giddy. And we knew that this was going to be a project that had a lot of heart and soul into it.’
Russell was a trailblazer in every sense, developing nearly 90 row houses in the Bedford Historic District, located in northwest Brooklyn, New York, between 1871 and 1892. She often served as the owner, architect and builder simultaneously — unusual for a woman working in the male-dominated building industry of the Gilded Age.
Her designs feature distinctive feminine flourishes: delicate plaster tapestries running along hallways and staircases, graceful curves in woodwork, and ornate ceiling medallions. These details, layered beneath decades of dark varnish and subsequent renovations, became the North Star for the Brownstone Boys’ restoration.
Frank Frances Studio
The client had lived in the house for seven years before approaching the duo — an arrangement that gave him an intimate understanding of how the vertical structure actually functioned. Splitting his time between New York and Berlin, he brought a distinctly European sensibility. ‘I remember on our first walkthrough, going in there, and seeing that he had a really nice art collection,’ Slocum notes. ‘I just knew that it was homey and he really cared for the property.’
The challenge became clear: how to honour Russell’s feminine architectural vision while incorporating the homeowners’ masculine European style, all while modernising a nineteenth-century brownstone for contemporary living.
‘Something really exciting for us in this project was a mix of masculinity and femininity,’ Slocum says. ‘We wanted to juxtapose [Russell’s] feminine touches and [the client’s] masculine touches. I think we landed in a nice middle spot between both.’
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Colour became the vehicle for marrying Russell’s sensibility with the homeowners’ influences. In the main bathroom, deep blue Golem tiles – sourced from Berlin – create an art deco atmosphere. An ensuite bathroom features striking green tiles from Winckelmans, a historic French tile maker, paired with complementary green wall paint. In the main bedroom, a terracotta-inspired pink was pulled directly from the colour of the brownstone visible through the rear windows.
The restoration work itself was equally complex. Stripping away layers of thick varnish revealed the woodwork’s natural beauty — and a puzzle. The original wainscoting was dramatically lighter than the door casings, creating a patchwork of different wood tones that had been masked for decades.
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‘Once we had it stripped, we were like, “Okay, now we have to figure out how to even these tones out,’’’ Bordelon recalls. The solution came from an unexpected source: a large original pier mirror in the living room, whose rich mahogany tone became the baseline for refinishing all the woodwork throughout the house.
The most dramatic intervention involved creating a new kitchen on the parlour floor — a reversal of the original Gilded Age layout, where kitchens were relegated to the garden level for servants. Because the homeowner converted the brownstone into a two-family home with a garden-level rental, he needed a kitchen upstairs for his triplex residence. To flood the new kitchen with light, the designers added a steel-and-glass arched doorway between two original windows – a space that had been a blank wall.
Frank Frances Studio
Frank Frances Studio
Throughout the twelve-month process, the designers maintained a reverence for the home’s original details, allowing them to take centre stage. Missing sections of ornate plasterwork were reconstructed with painstaking attention, and damaged door frames were carefully repaired to accommodate new doors that maintained the original style. The original inlaid flooring in the entryway became a defining feature, its design carried through the parlour floor to create continuity.
Frank Frances Studio
Perhaps most significantly, the restored plaster tapestry running along the hallways and up the staircase serves as a tangible connection to Russell’s architectural legacy. Rather than restoring these details to perfection, the designers chose to preserve some of the patina and wear, acknowledging the home’s journey through time.
Frank Frances Studio
‘These houses are 150 years old. They don’t have to look like they were built last week,’ Bordelon says. ‘They can still have that age on them, that patina on them, there’s some nicks, there’s some scars, there’s some pieces of the original that’s missing.’
For the designers, that plaster tapestry represents the heart of the project: ‘It really brought back all the many lives that have gone in and out of this house over the decades,’ Slocum says. The designers even gave the project a hashtag the homeowner loved: #SavingSusanna. ‘We kind of saved Susanna and we set her up for the next hundred years.’ thebrownstoneboys.com