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| Modernizing a Southern Home Without Losing Its Charm | Modernizing a Southern Home Without Losing Its Charm |
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| “It was like the belly of a whale,” says the designer Stefanie Brechbuehler of her latest project, a 19th-century Italianate rowhouse in Charleston, South Carolina that had been charred by a kitchen fire four years ago. “There was a lot of smoke damage,” adds her husband, the interior designer Robert Highsmith. “But the structure and historical elements of the house survived.” | |
| The polymathic couple, who run the Brooklyn design studio Workstead, purchased the property on stately Bee’s Row two years ago on behalf of an unnamed investor who planned to flip the house but, upon seeing the completed rooms, decided to keep it instead. It’s now become a showcase of sorts for the restrained, provenance-infused modernism that Brechbuehler, 39, and Highsmith, 35, have espoused since founding their interior, building and lighting firm with fellow Rhode Island School of Design alum Ryan Mahoney almost a decade ago. In recent years, Workstead has been turning its attention increasingly southward — in 2016, they finished the transformation of a midcentury-era Charleston government building into the majestic Dewberry Hotel, complete with a Rubenesque brass cocktail bar and cypress-clad spa. | The polymathic couple, who run the Brooklyn design studio Workstead, purchased the property on stately Bee’s Row two years ago on behalf of an unnamed investor who planned to flip the house but, upon seeing the completed rooms, decided to keep it instead. It’s now become a showcase of sorts for the restrained, provenance-infused modernism that Brechbuehler, 39, and Highsmith, 35, have espoused since founding their interior, building and lighting firm with fellow Rhode Island School of Design alum Ryan Mahoney almost a decade ago. In recent years, Workstead has been turning its attention increasingly southward — in 2016, they finished the transformation of a midcentury-era Charleston government building into the majestic Dewberry Hotel, complete with a Rubenesque brass cocktail bar and cypress-clad spa. |
| The firm’s nearby Workstead House, as it’s now known, doubles as a pied-à-terre for its owner and an events space for the couple who designed it, whose own second home is also in town. “We immediately fell in love with the grandness of the space,” Brechbuehler says of the five-bedroom manor, which was built as a private residence in 1853, later served as a warehouse for Civil War contraband and then belonged to George A. Trenholm, a 19th-century politician who was reported to be the author Margaret Mitchell’s muse for Rhett Butler in “Gone With The Wind.” | The firm’s nearby Workstead House, as it’s now known, doubles as a pied-à-terre for its owner and an events space for the couple who designed it, whose own second home is also in town. “We immediately fell in love with the grandness of the space,” Brechbuehler says of the five-bedroom manor, which was built as a private residence in 1853, later served as a warehouse for Civil War contraband and then belonged to George A. Trenholm, a 19th-century politician who was reported to be the author Margaret Mitchell’s muse for Rhett Butler in “Gone With The Wind.” |
| What daunted other buyers — namely that all 5,600 square feet of the site, which comes with its own carriage house, needed to be totally reworked — Brechbuehler and Highsmith relished. After installing new plumbing and wiring throughout, they forensically restored the original doors, windows, stairwell and heart-pine flooring with the help of local craftspeople. Once the interior architecture was complete, they painted most of the rooms a honeyed-stone hue (Farrow & Ball’s Savage Ground) and began filling the space with brass lighting, cabinetry and furniture of their own design, sparely adding antiques and art objects found on their travels (the elegant 19th-century oil painting by Franklin Tuttle in the parlor is the result of a particularly fruitful trip to Savannah). “We detest the idea of the ‘instant house,’” Highsmith says. “It’s all about the ritual involved in giving a space real personality, which takes time.” And with the carriage house still to complete, they’re in no rush — if anything, it’s a chance to trade the bleakness of another Brooklyn winter for some much-needed Southern heat. | What daunted other buyers — namely that all 5,600 square feet of the site, which comes with its own carriage house, needed to be totally reworked — Brechbuehler and Highsmith relished. After installing new plumbing and wiring throughout, they forensically restored the original doors, windows, stairwell and heart-pine flooring with the help of local craftspeople. Once the interior architecture was complete, they painted most of the rooms a honeyed-stone hue (Farrow & Ball’s Savage Ground) and began filling the space with brass lighting, cabinetry and furniture of their own design, sparely adding antiques and art objects found on their travels (the elegant 19th-century oil painting by Franklin Tuttle in the parlor is the result of a particularly fruitful trip to Savannah). “We detest the idea of the ‘instant house,’” Highsmith says. “It’s all about the ritual involved in giving a space real personality, which takes time.” And with the carriage house still to complete, they’re in no rush — if anything, it’s a chance to trade the bleakness of another Brooklyn winter for some much-needed Southern heat. |