Read the companion piece about Adrienne Brown’s Sutton Square townhome renovation from Dwell’s November/December 2025 issue.

As soon as Nancy Brown walked into 13 Sutton Place, a nearly 4,000-square-foot, three-bedroom, six-bathroom townhouse with unfettered views of the East River, she announced that she was going to live there. Just as quickly, her adult daughter, architect Adrienne Brown, asked her, “What, are you going to have sixteen adopted children?”

Nancy and her husband, Greg Brown, had long been empty nesters. A decade ago, they downsized to an apartment when they moved to New York from Michigan, where Nancy had worked as a professor and associate dean at Oakland University before becoming a dean at SUNY Old Westbury; Greg ran his own manufacturing business and still regularly commutes back to Michigan. Now, they were pulling a rare upsizing.

When the family first saw the house, it was a jumble of influences. It “had some really beautiful, historic period rooms, and then someone in the nineties had renovated it and done a French country seaside situation.… [The bathroom] was an under-the-sea kind of theme,” recalls Adrienne, who was the architect for her parents’ renovation as well as her own.

“The plaster looked like waves and bubbles of fish,” says Nancy.

As for the period rooms? The Browns had one of the home’s earliest owners to thank: the turn-of-the-century theatrical and literary agent Elisabeth Marbury. She was one of the pioneers of the Sutton Square neighborhood, purchasing the house in 1920 and reportedly convincing her friends Anne Morgan and Anne Harriman Vanderbilt to abandon Fifth Avenue and follow her eastward. They did, and all three women used the same architect, Mott B. Schmidt, to revitalize their new homes, with 1 and 3 Sutton Place (Vanderbilt’s and Morgan’s, respectively) designed as a coordinated pair.

Marbury had been living downtown on Irving Place with Elsie de Wolfe, today considered the country’s first interior decorator and popularizer of chintz, and de Wolfe accompanied Marbury to the new uptown location, where she lived until she married the British diplomat Sir Charles Mendl. Marbury and de Wolfe shared what was at the time known as a “Boston marriage”—a long-term, intimate but not explicitly sexual relationship between two unmarried women who lived together independently from men. Still, by all accounts Marbury and de Wolfe were romantic partners, and their relationship was literally built into many portions of the house.

Take the rear basement-level room. “A Charles the First oak-paneled room which was brought to me from England as a gift from Lady Mendl,” Marbury wrote in House Beautiful, referring to de Wolfe by her married name. “It has practically never been touched, save to keep the woodwork in good condition by an annual waxing and rubbing.”

That gift—Marbury’s dining room, now Nancy and Greg’s den—has survived untouched, for the most part. “There were doors,” Nancy says. “That was the hardest design decision we made. These gorgeous farm doors with leaded glass. But this is where you have to make decisions about do you want to live in a modern world or not?” So, in the interest of brightening the room and making the basement level more conducive to entertaining, Nancy and Greg took them out, replacing them with a wall of floor-to-ceiling glass doors, which completely open onto their stone patio.

One level up once held the library (“It is here I live, move, and have my being,” wrote Marbury in House Beautiful) and a paneled drawing room, which reflected de Wolfe’s taste. About the latter, Marbury wrote, “Every bit of furniture, the pictures, books, and ornaments, are of her selection.” Today, Marbury’s library is a formal living room with two slender built-in millwork shelves designed by Adrienne. The drawing room is now a formal dining area; a teal rug with a relief sits beneath a round marble table and a chandelier resembling a cluster of bubbles.

The second floor now holds Greg’s office, two bathrooms, and a guest room featuring a crystal-ship light fixture that came with the house (a remnant of the nautical theme done in a 1992 renovation that is found throughout), all where Marbury and de Wolfe’s bedrooms once were. “In the original floor plans they had back-to-back closets,” Adrienne says. “There was a secret door so they could visit without the servants knowing.”

“We had the same architect. That was one of the struggles. How do we make ’em not look alike?”
—Nancy Brown, resident

The design of the rest of the house was informed by Nancy and Greg’s love of entertaining—they have two separate wet bars on the lower two floors—and the reality of what the next stage of their life will look like. Just months after they closed on the house in late 2018, Nancy broke her ankle. “Suddenly, Greg and I are looking at each other and going, ‘We’re aging in a house with six floors…’”—albeit one with an elevator.

So they reconceptualized the entryway, which initially led directly into the kitchen, getting rid of “two awful little steps” that became impossible with Nancy’s injury and closing off the kitchen to allow for a breakfast nook. They added two features that would probably have been unthinkable to Marbury: in the cellar, a dog spa; and in the penthouse, a gym with the “nicest view of any gym in New York,” Adrienne says. And, in their bedroom suite on the third floor, they installed a coffee bar. “They’re not going to schlep all the way downstairs for coffee in the morning,” Adrienne says. Instead, Nancy and Greg now spend their mornings lying in bed with their as-freshly-brewed-as-possible coffee and “watch the world go by,” which isn’t so hard to do, considering their massive window looks directly out onto the East River.

“As our houses in the rear face east, the sun pours in all the forenoon—no tall buildings, nothing to obstruct either air or light,” Marbury wrote of the house that, upon her death, she would leave to de Wolfe. “Ours is indeed a garden spot, an oasis in New York. Not a sound at night but the river boats gliding up and down alive with fairy lights. An occasional whistle, but no honk-honk from automobiles, and no traffic sounds. It is all so peaceful that one might as well be living miles away.”

While Marbury and her scene of society women about town formed the cultural heart of the original Sutton Square, the Browns are starting to do the same. Not only do they own a solid seventh of the townhouses in the enclave, with Adrienne’s sister set to move into an apartment just across Sutton Place, but Greg is the current president of the homeowners’ association, and Adrienne is its consulting architect—a post that she tells me was formerly held by one-time resident I. M. Pei. Meanwhile, the youngest member of the family, Ben, gets free rein of both households. “I made an extra smoothie this morning, and Ben ran over with his cups to get some,” says Nancy. “Years ago, people lived like this.”

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: AKB Architecture Works

Builder: S. Donadic Inc.

Lighting Design: RS Lighting Design

Interior Design: RRP & Ellsworth Home

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