Habitats | Williamsburg, Brooklyn: Room to Feed 20 or Play With 2
January 15, 2011
“Remember how your mother reacted to the idea of our moving to Brooklyn?” Ms. Eisenman said one recent evening as she and Ms. Robinson sat facing each other in the living room of their cozy century-old house on Powers Street. “She asked if we’d need her to bring us milk, or maybe toilet paper. In her opinion, we were heading to the wild frontier.”
Hardly. But the journey to what one of Ms. Robinson’s relatives described as their “wacky house in Brooklyn” was not uneventful.
The couple had met in 1999. Ms. Robinson, 41, who started out as a filmmaker, spent the past seven years doing development work for the Dia Art Foundation. Ms. Eisenman, a 45-year-old artist whose work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, was born in France and moved to New York the day after she graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the couple moved upstate to Columbia County. But an artist can feel isolated in rural New York, and the idea of having children was percolating in both women’s minds. In fall 2004 they bought this three-story frame house for $590,000.
“We were told the house had been used as an S.R.O. building, and it was horribly run-down,” Ms. Robinson said. “But there was something about the proportions that appealed to us. The good bones, as they say.” Not to mention, Ms. Eisenman chimed in, with her usual flair for completing her partner’s sentences in deadpan fashion, “the 10 bowls of half-eaten cat food and the disgusting cesspool in the backyard. And the little shack we called the meth lab.”
The couple spent more than $200,000 on a gut renovation that included opening up the warren of tiny rooms to create an inviting layout. They ripped off multiple layers of wallpaper — “It was like we were seeing the history of wallpaper,” Ms. Eisenman said — and pulled up floorboards to reveal strange, ancient-looking plants. When they dug out the earth in the backyard, they discovered fragments of what looked like old Dutch pottery.
The moment they will never forget occurred on Ash Wednesday of 2005.
Ms. Eisenman was upstate at the time. Ms. Robinson was at her office in Manhattan. “And suddenly,” Ms. Eisenman said, “we both started getting all these frantic phone calls. Friends had called other friends, and through the Williamsburg lesbian grapevine, we learned that our new house was burning down.”
Racing to the site of their new purchase, they discovered that a fire had broken out when the pipes were being repaired. Firefighters had torn up the back of the house to douse the flames. “And now we have a whole lot of new skylights that we wouldn’t have had if the firemen hadn’t broken through the ceilings,” Ms. Eisenman said.
By spring 2005 the couple were settled in their new home. Their daughter, George, named after Ms. Robinson’s beloved longtime nanny, Elizabeth Anne George Lewis Tennant, was born in January 2007. Their son, Frederick, arrived two years later. Ms. Eisenman’s expressionist portrait of her son, all eyes and mouth, hangs on an upstairs wall, one of many resident works by her and her artist friends, among them Cindy Sherman, Marilyn Minter, Marlene Dumas and Tal R.
Despite the extensive renovation, many original details survive. Thick wooden beams reach up to 13-foot ceilings. The hallways are topped with tin ceilings so lavishly embossed with urns and medallions, Ms. Eisenman said, “we feel as if we’re living inside a giant wedding cake.”
The exterior, sheathed in what Ms. Robinson described as “hideous tar shingles,” is decidedly unprepossessing. “But inside,” she said, “there’s this nice little wonder.” And she thinks that the outside’s plainness deters burglars.
Not surprisingly, the house is immensely child-friendly. A large playroom occupies most of the ground floor. On one wall of the children’s shared bedroom Ms. Eisenman painted a huge mural featuring the antics of Foghorn the bird and Cy the cat, who was named for the artist Cy Twombly. Above Freddy’s crib hang a series of paintings made for Ms. Robinson by her godmother — an angel with sparkles, a girl skipping with a balloon, a collage speckled with doilies.
The house brims with other family memorabilia, among them a photograph of the young Victoria in a small white gown with her parents and her brother at her christening. Nearby hangs a painting of a rugby match by a great-grandmother of Ms. Eisenman’s named Esther Hammermann. Inheritances from Ms. Robinson’s mother include a Moroccan rug and a black lacquer Chinoiserie chest with secret compartments that now serves as a liquor cabinet. A great-grandfather of Ms. Robinson’s, a mining engineer who worked for De Beers, brought the stinkwood dining table back from South Africa.
The table is the centerpiece of a dining area that flows into an open kitchen, a space that exudes warmth, thanks to the braided rug and the open shelves filled with dishes and cookbooks. With the leaves inserted, the table seats 20, perfect for two enthusiastic hostesses.
Every Sunday night they cook dinner for friends, many of them the proverbial starving artists. “And before the kids,” Ms. Eisenman said, “we used to have amazing, elaborate parties.”
Often they took their inspiration from “The Decadent Cookbook: Recipes of Obsession and Excess.” But sometimes they created their own concoctions, one a dish they called Soul in Coffin, which was served on Halloween and featured a piece of sole shrouded in seaweed atop a bed of black linguine.
On another occasion they served roasted pig dressed with gold leaf.
“We’d planned a party on Feb. 25, which happened to be Anthony Burgess’s birthday,” Ms. Robinson said, alluding to the British writer probably best known for the deeply unsettling novella “A Clockwork Orange.” “So we honored him by being as over the top as we could.”
E-mail: habitats@nytimes.com
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