“I lean toward 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 work—chronicled in her new monograph, Elizabeth Roberts Architects: Collected Stories—always does 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 entity 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 specializes 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 or unsolved or misunderstood a structure has been and exactly what it needs to infuse it with new life,” writes Wendy Goodman in the book’s foreword. “Elizabeth creates character and purpose within a space that first and foremost invites comfort, ease, relaxation, and enjoyment.” (Although you don’t need to be invited into one of her homes to appreciate her work: Roberts transformed a 1927 auto-repair shop into the Rachel Comey store in SoHo, and a parking lot into the Brooklyn Museum’s sculpture garden.)
Ahead of the publication of her book, Roberts shares with Vogue a never-before-seen project of hers: a Catskills mountain house in Roscoe, New York. Like most of her projects, it has a rich story behind it—the land boasted a centuries-old wall that sparked Roberts’s imagination. “These 200-plus-year-old walls were from left over from farming,” she says. “I aligned the house them because it had just the perfect orientation of views.” The result? An effortless, clean structure that slopes from the old crumbling stones into the hill and lake below.
