Plywood Wainscoting Gives a Brooklyn Apartment New Character

That restraint is especially apparent in the living room. A long custom credenza runs beneath the paneling, with open pockets for records and a broad surface for display. The furniture group is deliberately loose: two coffee tables of different heights stand apart, while vintage chairs face into the room without making a rigid conversation circle. The room’s width is allowed to show. The built-in provides a stable edge, while the seating and tables keep the center flexible for family life.

Across the open dining area, materials and periods change, but the paneling keeps the room visually connected. Copper PH3 pendants hang over a midcentury table; Dutch oak chairs and a mirrored cabinet bring other kinds of surface and reflection into the arrangement. A floral painting sits within a substantial arched frame designed by Somerset House. The mirror catches the opposite side of the room, extending the view across it. Rather than matching every piece, the design uses the long open room as a setting for contrasts that can be seen together. The pendants, which had spent about nine decades in another home, bring a patina and history that new plywood cannot. That difference is useful: the room’s warm character comes from both fresh construction and objects that arrive with their own marks of use.

The kitchen keeps its existing cabinetry but changes its mood through color and a handmade zellige backsplash. Minster Green gives the cabinets a strong presence against the oak and pale walls; the irregular tile adds a surface with visible variation. Vintage Danish teak stools, altered with iron feet, bring the seating into the same conversation as the older furniture elsewhere. These are relatively contained moves, but they give the kitchen an identity of its own without interrupting the material continuity of the larger space.

At the stair, the plywood has to negotiate a more difficult condition than a flat wall. It wraps a steel support column, requiring the team to bend a brittle sheet material around a tight curve without cracking it. Several attempts were needed. The effort is legible in the result: the column no longer reads as a black structural element set against the interior but as part of the same timber surface. A red marble plinth nearby, carrying a Roman bust, breaks the run of beige and oak with a small, concentrated patch of color.

The private rooms loosen the shared palette. A dressing room is treated as a single field of blue, from enamel cabinetry to wall-to-wall carpet, with a Murano glass ceiling light and upholstered furniture adding sheen and texture. The room’s monochrome plan could have become a color exercise; the mix of surfaces gives it depth. It also answers a practical need for the owners, who had previously managed with little closet space. Making storage its own room turns a long-standing domestic constraint into a distinct part of the home.

The guest room doubles as an office and takes a more theatrical red direction, allowing it to earn its place between visits. In the main bedroom, limewashed walls, a dark vintage kilim, and a small games table beside the window produce a quieter mix. The range of treatments gives each room a different character, while the plywood wainscoting remains the project’s strongest shared gesture in the public spaces.

The result depends on a balance between a continuous architectural finish and a home filled with objects that do not belong to one period or style. The wood supplies a stable backdrop, but the interiors avoid treating the furniture as a museum collection. Built-ins hold records; chairs, tables, and art gather in a room meant for everyday use. The apartment’s new character comes less from any one collectible piece than from the way a commonplace material was carried carefully through the plan, finished until its color felt settled, and allowed to connect very different rooms without making them identical.