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.

Their 2,600-square-foot three-bedroom unit, which they bought in 2016, offered sunny views over a park and across the river to Lower Manhattan. The only problem was that the developer offered a cookie-cutter interior with almost no options for personalization.

“Having had a custom house, it was a little hard to go spec,” says Rachel. “I really didn’t want to feel like I was living in a generic unit.”

Looking to make the space their own, but without a gut remodel, they called on the architectural design firm Dash Marshall, which had recently completed a friend’s renovation that they admired. For their apartment Dash Marshall developed a series of elaborate built-ins that fundamentally changed the character of the space. “The idea was to take this unit and upgrade it,” says Ritchie Yao, who runs Dash Marshall along with Amy Yang and Bryan Boyer. “Like ‘Pimp My Ride,’” notes Yang.

“In California there’s so much space. Here it was, ‘How can we use each space multiple ways?’” —Rachel Klauber-Speiden, resident

With custom millwork built by Structure NYC, they added a wall of overlapping oak fins with oversized integrated pegboards for hanging coats in the entrance hall. At one end of the main living area, they created a flexible, multipurpose room with enormous oak and ribbed glass doors and built-in shelving—when open, the arrangement functions as an extension of the living space; when closed, it serves as a cozy guestroom.

In the bedroom for the couple’s son, now 11, Dash Marshall added cabinets resembling stacked boxes for storage and a platform for his bed. Along the wall that separates his room from his 13-year-old sister’s, the designers created interlocking nooks for side-by-side, but separate, desks for the siblings, who can lift tiny screens to pass notes or otherwise conspire. Josh and Rachel’s interior windowless office now has backlit glass panels and is furnished with both a daybed nook for a casual work space and a more formal desk.

“The kids’ rooms have a ‘confessional talking window’ between them. We almost always propose weird stuff like that, but it doesn’t always get built.” —Bryan Boyer, designer

The result is an apartment that not only appears dramatically different from others in the building, but also gives the family an expanded sense of space. “The things they designed for us we use every day,” says Rachel, “multiple times and in multiple ways.”

Project Credits:

Architectural designer: Dash Marshall / @dashmarshall

Architect of Record: CODE LLC

General Contractor: Structure NYC

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