Suspend Disbelief, Designers Fill a Brooklyn Heights Mansion

The house on the corner of Monroe Place and Clark Street spent years behind scaffolding. This fall, every room in it is throwing a different party.

The 2026 Brooklyn Heights Designer Showhouse, a biennial fundraiser for the Brooklyn Heights Association, is open at 1 Monroe Place through Sunday, November 1. Cara Greenberg opens her walk-through for Brownstoner with a line that works as a dress code. "Suspend all disbelief, ye who enter here."

The House

The mansion went up in 1852 in the Greek Revival style for a New York merchant, Samuel Bell, according to Design News Now. Brownstoner calls it an 1850s corner brownstone in a mix of Greek Revival and Italianate. A fourth-story mansard roof went on in the 1860s.

By the 1890s the Weir family lived there, and their flower business was a neighborhood fixture for decades. In the 20th century the house became apartments. It sits in Brooklyn Heights, New York City's first historic district.

A multi-year gut renovation used archival images to guide the restoration. The house now runs to 9,525 square feet, with nine bedrooms, seven baths and a roof terrace. Brownstoner reports that NV/design.architecture of Gowanus restored the exterior, stoop, top floor and mansard, and that the interiors were handed over as white boxes. With no traditional order to the rooms, designers were free to invent their purpose.

Design News Now announced a roster of 17 firms. Proceeds support the association's work protecting the neighborhood.

Room by Room

Greenberg's tour is the best map. Some of what she found.

The parlor, by Unionworks, pairs Brazilian mid-century furniture with a chiaroscuro carpet from Atelier Février and new classical moldings, under a mobile by Lindsey Adelman. Sugarhouse Design & Architecture covered the dining room in flowered House of Hackney wallpaper on a dark ground, and gave the kitchen a long marble island on English country legs.

Hannah Hemmerly Studio lined the drawing room in seafoam-blue grasscloth, framed broken Ginori plates as art and painted neoclassical scenes in the bath. SRF Interiors made a pink, floral snug with a tiny bar, coral wallpaper and art hung salon style.

Upstairs, Hallie Goodman's primary bedroom has an oversized red velvet headboard and a plaster-and-foam mantel by Maayan Zilberman. Its imagined occupant is a woman who has walked away from the convent. "She left the nunnery and she's having herself a time," as Brownstoner puts it.

Emily Eng took her study from Napoleon's neoclassical bedroom at Malmaison, with upholstered walls, a tented fabric ceiling, an antique bed and a 1920s French desk. Max Aboody's listening room has red velvet walls and a mirrored bar. Brian Cash Works built a bedroom around the St. George Hotel, a center of gay life in the 1920s and '30s.

The yoga and wellness suite, by Adroit Architecture & Interior Design, has real moss and birch bark on the ceiling and a faux sauna in what used to be a closet.

On the roof, Stollar Fearins Welch staged an imaginary athletic club, with trellises, wicker and a ping-pong table on AstroTurf.

"We leaned into not making it serious." Erin Fearins of Stollar Fearins Welch, via Brownstoner

The Back Stairs

Not every gesture is large. The painter Katie Westmoreland covered the plain back stair in loose brushstrokes and hand-painted flowers, which turns a service route into a room of its own. Paige Blodgett gave the laundry ivy wallpaper and a custom ironing board.

Downstairs, Llewellyn Chupin sank a living room into the floor in the spirit of a 1960s conversation pit. Outside, Field Form of Gowanus pulled up some slate pavers so rain can soak in and planted regional and coastal species such as Atlantic white cedar and viburnum, choosing them because some older plantings are struggling as the city's climate changes.

That is the quiet argument of the showhouse. Even in a landmarked mansion, the best choices are often where guests are not supposed to look.

What to Know Before You Go

The house is at 1 Monroe Place, at Clark Street. It is open Thursdays and Fridays from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., according to Brownstoner. Tickets are $50 through the Brooklyn Heights Association. It closes Sunday, November 1, which leaves two more weekends.

Go late on a Thursday or Friday, when the hours run to 7 and the light through the parlor windows goes low. For another way into the city's private rooms, see our guide to Open House New York.

Suspend your disbelief at the door. The designers already did.