Elizabeth Roberts asked Christine Coulson to write a short story for a book about Brownstones and other houses.
When architect Elizabeth Roberts hits a creative block, it’s often just a sign that she hasn’t gathered enough information. For the Californian who’s been lauded for renovating New York townhouses (Maggie Gyllenhaal And Peter Sarsgaard‘S Park Slope Brownstone And Athena Calderone‘S Cobble Hill Greek Revival Among them), this could mean the history of the neighborhood, or the way the rising sun hits a building. The same was true when the owner of a sprawling lot at the top of a Catskills hill invited her to submit a proposal. The possibilities initially seemed daunting; the house, she says, “could be anything.” But as she considered the space, “I realized that the stone walls stacked all over the property told me where the house wanted to be.” They served not only as guides, but as the structure of the building and a key design element. “After hundreds of years, and understanding slope, light, and views, these farmers got it done.”
An old postcard from a lake in Roscoe, New York.FLOTO+WARNER.
Roberts documented this process of layering in her first monograph, Collected stories (Monacelli), which she co-wrote with Alanna Stang and chronicles projects ranging from that mountain home to Rachel Comey’s flagship SoHo store. “I like to do light, airy, gorgeous things alongside the gritty, elaborate things,” she says—perhaps a natural juxtaposition between the “wide open spaces” of her Marin County childhood and the “resilience and history” of New York City that captured her heart as an adult. Likewise, in the book, glossy images of travertine bathrooms, preserved crown moldings, and her signature white walls (Benjamin Moore’s soothing Cloud White in pristine historic restorations and new construction; Chantilly Lace to brighten a basement apartment or the walls of her own architectural firm) coexist alongside fragmentary sketches and ephemera: an antique postcard from a lake up north, a map of Brooklyn circa 1766.
Elizabeth Roberts and Christine Coulson.TAYLOR JEWELL.
But what brings the book to life, for Roberts, is the delivery of short stories by Christine Coulson, a veteran of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for more than 25 years, who Urban Stories (2019) imagines sentient works of art and One Woman Show (2023) depicts human life through museum wall labels. Coulson may share Roberts’ appreciation for white space—at least in her windowless writing room, lit by skylights—but their approach is in fact the opposite. Coulson asked Roberts to send her photographs, context-free, free-associative, surreal, and touching: the end of a relationship from a historic bell tower, teenagers “fencing” upstairs, spurred on by a lofty entry hall. “The stone has pushed itself up through the floor,” Coulson wrote in response to the enormous marble kitchen island of an Italianate townhouse, “like a gentle beast offering its back for utilitarian use.” (She has a wry eye for human quirks: “It’s interesting, our desire to move huge blocks of earth and rock into our homes, at great expense.”)
The living room of the Roscoe Mountain house—stacked with rocks inside and out.FLOTO+WARNER.
The miniatures “are a metaphor for what architects have to do all the time,” Coulson said. “They build these beautiful places and then they have to let people live in them. In a way, these stories are me living in Elizabeth’s work.”
