Creative Renovation in Brooklyn

A decade ago, Jeanette Abbink (then Hodge) lived in a teeny-tiny San Francisco apartment crammed with her collection of eggbeaters, over a hundred of them—"an extension," she says, "of my fascination with eggs." Most people don’t regard eggbeaters as aesthetic objects, but Jeanette could see that they are actually elegant little machines, like something out of a Leonardo da Vinci sketchbook. One day Jeanette, who was Dwell’s founding creative director, judged a design competition where she met fellow juror Mike Abbink, who was, at the time, deeply immersed in designing a beautifully clear yet eccentric font called FF Kievit. They soon ran off to City Hall to get married, and eventually they packed up their eggbeaters and typography books and moved to a characteristically open and sunny, 1,500-square-foot loft apartment by leading Bay Area designer Stanley Saitowitz.