A California Couple Give a Cookie-Cutter Brooklyn Condo Some Personality

When Rachel Klauber-Speiden and Josh Empson moved from Santa Monica to New York for Josh’s job in finance, they weren’t just changing cities—they were also giving up their modernist dream home, one they and an architect had designed and built from scratch. Well aware that real estate in New York City was a different beast, with fewer opportunities for a single-family home, they looked for an apartment instead and found a new condominium at the edge of the East River in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn.