“I lean towards imperfection,” Elizabeth Roberts says of her style. To anyone who has seen her work, it feels like a surprising statement. Roberts, the critically acclaimed architect who transformed the Brooklyn brownstones of Maggie Gyllenhaal, Phoebe Philo muse Daria Werbowy, and fashion designer Ulla Johnson, is a perennial fixture in Architectural Digest because her work presents as very much the opposite: warm, composed, airy, and well.
.. perfect.
Yet, Roberts’s projects – chronicled in her new monograph, Elizabeth Roberts Architects: Collected Stories – always do have an organic undertone. She embraces natural materials like oak and marble. (Lots of marble.
See: Athena Calderone’s former townhouse in Cobble Hill .) Then, there’s her almost magical knack for harnessing sunlight to flood an entire living room – a rare yet highly desirable thing in New York. Roberts, who grew up in Marin and studied at Berkeley, believes the dramatic moodiness of the NorCal landscape will forever fuel her: “I think there’s some kind of earthy Northern California girl in me that is always having a little bit of conversation with New York City,” she adds.
Roberts also specialises in historic renovation – a necessary niche for the owners of 18th- and 19th-century buildings you’re likely to find in Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope. “I’ve always thought of Elizabeth as a house whisperer. She seems able to intuit the unseen forces in the past of a project: how loved .