Maple Plywood Wainscoting Anchors This 3,600-Square-Foot Brooklyn Home

A 3,600-square-foot gut-renovated house in Brooklyn got its character from one of architecture's humblest materials: oak plywood wainscoting, developed with Studio BAD over roughly six months.

The clients, a couple with growing children, had traded their original dream of a historic brownstone for an extra-wide house with high ceilings, open spaces, and garden views. The interior, freshly renovated, offered none of the character. They found their designer by accident. The couple booked an appointment at Somerset House, the collectible design gallery in Queens co-founded by Alan Eckstein and his wife, Haley Loewenthal, simply to browse furniture. They discovered that Eckstein had expanded from sourcing and staging into full residential design, with only a few completed projects at the time.

"Maybe it was a risk in some ways, but we just felt really good about taking that leap with him and building something together," the husband says.

Eckstein rejected the blank palette outright. "I did not want bare. I did not want cold. I did not want a minimalist playground," he says. "I wanted life, I wanted warmth everywhere."

His reference point was deliberately obscure: unadorned maple plywood wainscoting in Jean-Michel Frank's 1920s interiors for Marie-Laure and Charles de Noailles's town house in Paris. The couple hesitated when renderings showed wood, and plywood, everywhere. Eckstein persuaded them. Oak plywood now runs as wainscoting throughout the home and clads the staircase, finished with rounded bullnose trim.

Execution proved difficult. Plywood stains inconsistently, and early attempts came out too red, too yellow, and too golden. "I lost sleep over that process," the wife says. "I couldn't even imagine this home without the wood," she adds of the finished result.

The completed house is roughly 80 percent vintage, with about half of those pieces drawn from Somerset House's own inventory. The living room centers on a bespoke credenza with vinyl pockets that runs across the wall, alongside a pair of oak Guillerme et Chambron French armchairs. Eckstein kept durability in mind. "Everything here could take life, could take abuse for the most part," he says. "I wanted to use every inch of the space as one big conversation, one big hangout."

In the dining area, a pair of 1930s "PH3" copper pendants by Poul Henningsen hangs above a midcentury dining table. That particular set came from a home where the fixtures had hung for about 90 years.

Color drives the remaining rooms. The couple's long-deferred wish for a proper dressing room — "My last closet was in my son's bedroom," the husband says — became a fully monochromatic space in Benjamin Moore's Bluebelle, after the wife's pink proposal was rejected and green briefly led. They sampled more than a dozen shades before landing on the blue. "You don't want it to become a cartoon of a room," the wife says. The room pairs the paint with a lustrous carpet and a 1930s Murano glass ceiling light.

A guest room that doubles as an office took a louder turn. The couple resisted leaving a bed idle in a city where a spare room is a luxury — "that's such a waste," the husband says. The result is what he calls a "hilarious red room," over-the-top but cozy, "like Hugh Hefner's smoking jacket." Guests tell them the house looks elevated without pretension, and that it doesn't feel like New York at all. "It's gorgeous, every detail is considered, and it's immaculate," the wife says of Eckstein's aesthetic. "But it's not untouchable."