![]() ![]() “We said, ‘We’re going to Brooklyn, so let’s just pretend we’re moving to the country.’ ” And they do. “We went for the full thing, basically,” explains Halard. The result in spring, with the garden blooming, is a lush Arcadia worlds away from the dense Jenga towers of the Gowanus Houses across the street and the hurtling F train two blocks away. “I wanted to really plant everywhere, so we only had room to walk,” she says. With everything from pale-lilac erigeron to woodland poppies, the original plan was to highlight “the girls’ colors.” But in the end, the temptation to try everything prevailed. And Miranda did all the colors,” explains Halard, surrounded by walls painted his wife’s favorite hue: Fenching Blue from Papers and Paints in London. ![]() It was more about being clever, just finding a bit of charm. “It wasn’t about an architectural statement, really. Everything else was redone and brought in, much of it found at antiques fairs upstate but made to look like it had been there forever-from the vintage escutcheons scavenged at Manhattan’s Olde Good Things to the many reclaimed doors they’re affixed to. He preserved the staircase and happily exposed the joists. Halard embarked on the renovation while working for architect Peter Marino, sneaking out at lunchtime to chaperone the contractors. “You’re not going to like it.” But the car she’d ordered was already idling downstairs, so she made the journey and entered the small garden-then covered in solid paving stones-“and saw the little carriage house and just said, ‘It’s perfect for us,’ ” Brooks remembers. “The garden is tiny,” Halard called Brooks to say. The nineteenth-century house had been converted into a four-family apartment building sometime in the 1970s.
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