Meet the yours, mine, and ours remodel. Seeing Studio Oink’s international work, including our feature on the Luminous Washington D.C. Row House that Lea and Matthias had designed from afar, inspired the Brooklyn couple to travel to Leipzig and enlist the two to work with Hatchet on their house.
Photography by Matthew Williams, courtesy of Studio Oink.
“There were a lot of voices in the room,” says Matt, “but we speak the same design language: we all use color and materials judiciously.” Come see the results.
For reasons of time and cost, the team elected to preserve the envelope of the 2,200 square-foot house though the interior was entirely rebuilt.
They replaced the existing vinyl siding with shou sugi ban panels sourced from Nakamoto Forestry, “one of the few providers in the US that still does this in the traditional method,” says Matt.
Early on, the Hatchet team under Matt came up with the idea of creating a light well in the center of the house by configuring the layout around a large skylight in the roof: “the structure is only 16 feet wide and 50 feet long, and all of the rooms look into the light well,” says Matt.
Parlor Floor
Garden Floor
A two-story kitchen is set in a newly excavated basement that opens to the garden.
The dining table and kitchen island are situated at the center of the house with the roof skylight overhead.
A Muller Van Severen Neon Light hangs over the island stocked with Collapsible Storage Bins by Hay. The range is a Fisher & Paykel and the matte White Kitchen Faucet is from Nivito.
The custom cabinets are birch plywood lightened with a natural bleaching agent.
“Hatchet was up to the task, but it took a lot of phone calls.” “The result speaks for itself and creates a particularly warm and soft atmosphere in the kitchen,” says Lea.
The dining table and bench are Studio Oink designs built by local artist/furniture maker William Fegan of Wild Willy’s Woodshop.
“We love the playful elements that Oink incorporates with their colors and silhouettes, and the way they make small spaces feel open.”
Happy to be home: “When we started this project, I wasn’t yet pregnant,” says Scarlett, who grew up in Brooklyn and left a career in finance to focus on her ceramic art.
The fridge is concealed in an open pantry with outlets at counter height for making coffee. The ceramic water filter is a Walter on a steel stand.
The family spend most of their time in the kitchen and the sunken spot under the stair is the play area.
The compact bathroom has a stone Vasco Colonna Basin from Salvatori and Wall-Mounted One-Handle Faucet from Vola. The walls are painted in Farrow & Ball Drop Cloth.
The shower is tiled in the same dot-patterned Pico Natural Blanc tiles from Mutina as the kitchen. The reeded glass partition/splash guard is fixed in place with a powder-coated white metal frame around it.
Mezzanine
The paneling of Finnish birch plywood (sourced from Koskisen) extends from one end of the house to the other, and was envisioned by Studio Oink “like a big piece of furniture.”
The office has a Studio Oink birch plywood desk at one end overlooking the backyard.
They would have been great to have, but as the bills kept growing we had to stop somewhere.”
The office overlooks the kitchen—two sets of shutters close off the room and there are plans to install bookshelves to insulate the space.
“One of the strengths of the house,” notes Matt, “is there are not a lot of normative rooms, there’s open-endedness.”
Scarlett and Joe’s bedroom, with walls painted Farrow & Ball Jitney, is one of three on the second floor. Wild Willy’s Woodshop built the couple’s platform bed with integrated side tables.
Second Floor
The main bath abuts the light well. To make it work Studio Oink inserted a panel of windows with a two-way mirror on the right, a true mirror on the left, and a center medicine cabinet with a sliding metal-mesh front.
The upstairs front bedroom, currently a guest room, is painted in Farrow & Ball Setting Plaster. The potted monstera and fiddle-leaf fig overlooking the light well moved with the family from their former home.
The guest and baby rooms share a tidy Jack and Jill bath painted in Farrow & Ball Skimming Stone.
The bathtub and shower are separated by pocket doors.
Upstate, NY, workshop Accordance with Nature was commissioned to make the wardrobe in the nursery: “Scarlett and Joe love working with the people who create the pieces,” says Matt.
A By Mölle Linen Curtain covers the window wall in the baby’s room, which has a view across the light well.
We can’t wait to be able to invite Lea and Matthias and their family to Brooklyn to see the results in person.” See more photos of the project at Hatchet.
Studio Oink plans to continue working on “projects that are close to our hearts and with people for whom it is also an affair of the heart.” Here are three more of their projects.