Why Elizabeth Roberts is in the Design 100

Elizabeth Roberts has spent more than two decades reworking Brooklyn’s nineteenth-century housing stock, turning brownstones and townhouses across Park Slope, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill into homes that read as continuations of a building’s history rather than replacements for it. Trained in both architecture and historic preservation, she works from the premise that these houses already carry enough character — an expanded rear extension, salvaged materials and a well-proportioned, quiet room tend to do more for a project than a full strip-out.

That approach earned her the New York Times’ description as a “titan of the town house”, and her practice has appeared repeatedly on Architectural Digest’s AD100 list. What distinguishes the work is restraint rather than intervention: white-walled rooms, modern furniture set against original mouldings, and a determination to keep old fabric visible rather than erase it. It is a Brooklyn sensibility as much as a design one — unhurried, and more interested in a house’s longevity than in reinventing it.