Clinton Hill is one in a constellation of neighborhoods that make up “Brownstone Brooklyn,” where fin-de-siècle townhouses repeat one after the other, sometimes the length of entire city blocks. A wonderful idiosyncrasy arises from this rhythm of bays, stoops, and subtly varied details—one that is occasionally broken by a downtrodden fixer-upper. For a married couple living in a small apartment with their two children, purchasing and renovating one such property seemed the best way to give the family much-needed space and further anchor themselves to the borough. To realize their ambitious plan, they turned to artist-architect Shane Neufeld, principal of Brooklyn-based Light and Air (L/AND/A).

Leafing through a magazine, the couple happened upon Neufeld’s airy renovation of his own historic townhouse in Brooklyn’s nearby Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. “It was unlike many other renovations we had seen, which stuck to the prototypical brownstone floor plan with a bunch of broken-up spaces,” they explain. “And when we saw Shane’s firm name—those were the two things we missed most during the pandemic.”