Elizabeth Roberts Architects
Architects · Americas“Since 2002, Elizabeth Roberts has built a Brooklyn practice around sensitive renovation, restraint and material honesty rather than the wholesale reinvention favoured elsewhere.”
Why Elizabeth Roberts Architects 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.