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Business partners and married couple Everick and Lisa Brown have had a long time to hone their working relationship. The two first met in elementary school in Los Angeles, and attended school together all the way through high school. After they graduated, however, they lost touch for about two decades before reconnecting at a high school reunion. Soon, they were not only romantically involved, but L.A.-based Lisa also began running the business side of Everick’s interior design company, which is located in New York. The two carried on a bicoastal relationship for over a decade, before Lisa finally moved out to Yorktown Heights, New York, and into the stunning Shingle-style home where they still live today.
For Lisa in particular, buying and decorating the house was a leap of faith: She was still based on the West Coast when they purchased it about 10 years ago, which meant Everick was in charge of creating an aesthetic that suited both of them. “The collaboration was that she had to be happy; let’s cut to the chase,” Everick says with a laugh. “But I do think what makes a good designer—Christian Liaigre put it best, ‘There’s no such thing as a great designer; there are only great clients.’” Lisa demurs, however: “The opposite of that [phrase] is trust your designer,” she says. “When I see his work in our clients’ homes, it’s flawless; it’s perfect. If it’s not right, he sees it before anyone else. I always defer to his expertise, because I know that I’ll be happy in the end.” It also helped that the couple’s new home was the ideal canvas for Everick’s creativity.
Everick and Lisa fell in love with the four-bedroom, four-bath Shingle-style home because of its quirky beauty and thoughtful construction. It was designed by architect Barry Donaldson in 1986 as his own residence; the Browns were the first owners to move in after Donaldson and his wife. “They lived on the land for about three months, monitoring the sun, to figure out the positioning of the house,” Lisa says of the original siting. For Everick, who wanted a body of water on property as well as an elevated site, the over-six-acre plot provided him with both (there is a pond in the backyard). “Initially, we didn’t really know why we were attracted to the house,” he says. “But when we dug in and understood its origins—because it was very deliberate, having been designed by an architect who studied under the school of Shingle-style homes—it is both classic and modern in style. And that really is the epitome of what we are.”
As the home’s bones were basically flawless, the renovations they undertook were essentially all aesthetic: The couple did no major construction work until they redesigned their bathroom earlier this year. That said, they changed the color palette drastically from that of the previous owners. “The kitchen was Dartmouth green and the library was coral orange,” says Lisa. “Everything was yellow or powder blue or pink. Every room got painted.” But when former owner Victoria saw the home after the Browns’ work, there was nothing but approbation. “She said, ‘This is what this house was meant to be, because you can finally see all the beautiful architecture without all of the distracting paint colors,’” Lisa relates.
For the redesign, Everick stuck to a mostly neutral palette with pops of warm tones. The couple’s bedroom, for example, is painted with Sherwin-Williams’s Elephant Ear, with Arhaus bedlinens in a mix of creams and grays. There are dashes of bright orange, however, in the custom-made striped throw pillows on the bed. A similar theme is echoed in the cozy library, which is outfitted with floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with mementos from the couple’s travels. Sherwin-Williams’s Folkstone, a gray with a hint of purple, covers the walls and shelves, while vintage Eero Saarinen chairs and a Classic Rug Collection custom wool-and-silk rug add lively pops of bright red.
But the couple’s favorite room is one they dub “the talking room,” or what most might call the living room. “It’s sort of our analog room,” Everick says. “There are no electronics except for the Sonos speaker to bring in music. It’s like sitting in a treehouse.” The large and sunlit space provides views of trees, and the furniture is arranged in, of course, conversational groupings. What is most striking about it is the mélange of styles: There is a vintage pleather armchair from a thrift store, but also an original Eames midcentury plywood screen. But somehow, because of the composition and color palette, it all works. The same can be said for the house as a whole: Everick drew from multiple streams of inspiration to fashion a house that is uniquely his and Lisa’s. And that, perhaps, is the true definition of what a great designer does.
