AS A CHILD in Virginia, Michael Brown collected birds’ nests, stamps and mounted beetles and butterflies. By the age of 10, he had graduated to Goofus glass vases — cold-painted trinkets produced within the early twentieth century that had been typically given as fairground prizes — and old school spectacle frames he’d discover at native flea markets. His first job, at 18, was dressing home windows on the Richmond division retailer Thalhimers, and on the weekends he started accumulating vintage furnishings and curiosities, a behavior that continued into maturity, as he labored as an inside stylist and retail artwork director, choosing up treasures wherever he went: a Twenties lacquered gold Japanese display from a stint dwelling in Portland, Ore.; sun-bleached sea turtle shells from a trip in Maine. By the point the 59-year-old discovered his present house in 2013, a 1,000-square-foot, one-bedroom rental on the highest flooring of a brownstone within the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, he wanted a 20-foot truck to move the products he’d gathered. “I want I may very well be a kind of individuals who might purchase a factor, reside with it, throw it out and transfer on,” he says. “However I can’t.”
Inside weeks of Brown’s settling in, the condominium was virtually unrecognizable. He had been drawn to the constructing’s well-preserved Nineteenth-century particulars and left the unique pine-and-walnut marquetry flooring and carved oak fire mantels untouched. However he repainted the partitions to create atmospheric backdrops for his objects. In the lounge, whose broad bay window friends onto a sea of untamed gardens to the south, he selected a grayish blush that ripens right into a rosy shell pink at twilight; for the compact jewel-box library, a deep Prussian blue; and for the generously sized bed room, whose shuttered home windows face the quiet tree-lined road beneath, a comforting shade of clotted cream. His possessions are exhibited in dense, ever-evolving preparations that, within the type of a Renaissance-era Wunderkammer, overlook conventional distinctions of worth or provenance in favor of sheer delight. Hung salon-style on the partitions of the small galley kitchen — a contemporary afterthought tacked on to the flat’s west wing when the home was transformed into flats in 2011 — are numerous photos of meals that Brown has picked up through the years (together with a close-up of an English breakfast by the British photographer Martin Parr), brown-and-white Eighties-era transferware dishes and small cabinets stacked with classic sake cups from Japan. In the lounge, a built-in Nineties oak hutch is now a show case for the stylist’s bounty of crepe paper fruit and veggies, which he purchased from the beloved present retailer Tail of the Yak in Berkeley, Calif. And perched in all places are vintage taxidermy birds: a quail, a sparrow, two jays, a redheaded woodpecker and, enclosed by a tall glass dome, a yellow canary.
“When he first came visiting, he was in all probability horrified,” Brown says of his accomplice, Duy Pham, a 34-year-old graphic designer who was born in Vietnam and lived in Canada for 10 years earlier than dwelling in a collection of rental flats in New York. When he moved in with Brown in 2018, he introduced with him little greater than a group of artwork books, a few of which, to Brown’s horror, had been stripped of their mud jackets. However Pham’s career and itinerant previous have additionally taught him to adapt. “I exploit what I’m given,” he says. “To me, that’s much more fascinating than having a clean canvas.” And so, he and Brown started an ongoing technique of integrating their seemingly incompatible visions of what house is — a utilitarian crash pad; a private museum — into an area wherein they each really feel impressed.
FIRST, THEY PURCHASED a number of key objects collectively that will mood the condominium’s ornate, Outdated World really feel. In every room, the couple put in a in a different way formed Isamu Noguchi paper pendant, their crisp white kinds offsetting Brown’s darkish wooden furnishings, together with a pair of Nineteen Forties wingback armchairs upholstered in a cornflower blue and chocolate Scalamandré reduce velvet. On a stroll by New York’s Decrease East Aspect in the future, they got here throughout a gallery run by the Japanese artist Kazuko Miyamoto and purchased a balsa wooden maquette — an irregular white dice a few foot throughout that she had made for considered one of Sol LeWitt’s Minimalist sculptures whereas working as his assistant — that now hangs on the living-room wall. Extra not too long ago, they imported a ’60s Dieter Rams couch from Amsterdam, its modular fiberglass base a daring distinction to the light ocher floral-patterned rug on which it stands.
Cohabiting, in fact, has additionally required a specific amount of enhancing and compromise. Within the 100-square-foot library, the bookshelves that run alongside the japanese wall are nonetheless topped with Brown’s Goofus glass vases and, on the alternative wall, a Twenties vitrine nonetheless incorporates a beneficiant assortment of the various mercury-glass vessels he has gathered over the many years. However the room’s as soon as in depth taxidermy menagerie has been downsized; among the many few survivors are a spiny lobster, encased in an acrylic field that sits atop the vitrine, and a misshapen iguana that Brown says is “too ugly to half with.” Not lengthy after Pham moved in, they began a month-to-month flea market within the yard of their pals’ close by restaurant in an effort to unload; the ritual finally developed into periodic stoop gross sales outdoors the couple’s brownstone. Final yr, the pair launched a web-based retailer, SpeakLow, providing every thing from Nineteen Fifties Japanese silver demitasse spoons to the palm-size woodland dioramas that Brown crafts from moss, tree bark and hand-carved clay mushrooms.
The couple’s opposing aesthetics are most clearly on show within the bed room: The wall behind the black upholstered platform mattress is roofed virtually completely with nudes in numerous mediums, a patchwork of each Brown’s assortment of midcentury tutorial sketches and works by a few of Pham’s favourite modern photographers, together with a picture of interlocking our bodies by Ren Dangle. The visible rigidity created by two viewpoints that may appear at odds with each other has manifested a type of particular alchemy that Brown and Pham finally favor over their particular person tastes. “There’s a way that the issues aren’t meant to be collectively however in some way make area for one another,” says Pham. Whereas Brown has discovered to let go of sure belongings, Pham more and more sees the worth in having possessions. “Through the pandemic, quite a lot of my pals simply packed up and moved away. That’s all the time been my dream, or maybe how I solved crises up to now,” he says. “However when you’ve issues, you possibly can’t simply depart.” The couple’s house, as he sees it now, is a product of their shared expertise, one thing they’ve constructed collectively over time that’s stable, advanced — and never simply dismantled.