Elizabeth Roberts Got Christine Coulson to Write Flash Fic for a Book on Brownstones and Other Homes

When architect Elizabeth Roberts has a creative block, it’s usually just a sign she hasn’t collected enough information yet. For the California transplant made famous by her airy overhauls of New York town houses (Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard’s Park Slope brownstone and Athena Calderone’s Cobble Hill Greek Revival among them), this might mean the neighborhood’s history, or how the rising sun hits a building. Such was the case, too, when the owners of a plot sprawling over a Catskills hilltop invited her to submit a proposal. The possibilities initially proved stifling; the home, she says, “could be anything.” But in considering the space, “I realized that these stacked stone walls all over the property told me where the house wanted to be.” They served not only as a guide but also as the building’s structure and a crucial design element. “After hundreds of years, and understanding the grade and the light and the views, these farmers nailed it.”

A vintage postcard from a Roscoe, New York, lake.FLOTO+WARNER.

‘Elizabeth Roberts Architects: Collected Stories’

Roberts has captured this layered process in her first monograph, Collected Stories (Monacelli), which she cowrote with Alanna Stang and which chronicles projects ranging from that mountain house to Rachel Comey’s SoHo flagship. “I love doing bright, open, glassy gorgeous things beside dusty, ornate things,” she says—a natural amalgamation, perhaps, of the “wide-open spaces” of her Marin County childhood and the NYC “grit and history” that won her adult heart. Likewise, in the book, sleek images of a travertine-clad bathroom, preserved crown moldings, and her signature white walls (Benjamin Moore’s mellow Cloud White in pristine historic restorations and new builds; Chantilly Lace to brighten a basement apartment or the walls of her own architecture firm) live alongside loose sketches and ephemera: a vintage postcard from an upstate lake, a Brooklyn map circa 1766.

Elizabeth Roberts and Christine Coulson.TAYLOR JEWELL.

But what breathed life into the book, for Roberts, was the infusion of flash fiction by Christine Coulson, the veteran of more than 25 years of The Metropolitan Museum of Art whose Metropolitan Stories (2019) imagined sentient artworks and One Woman Show (2023) described a human life through museum wall labels. Coulson may share Roberts’s appreciation for white space—at least in her windowless writing studio, lit by skylights—but their methods are practically inverse. Coulson asked Roberts to send photos sans context, free-associating pithy scenes, surreal and moving: the end of a relationship from an image of a historic bell, teens “fencing” upstairs prompted by a lofty entrance hall. “The stone had pushed itself up through the floor,” Coulson writes in response to the huge marble kitchen island of an Italianate town house, “like a gentle beast offering the ridge of its back for utilitarian use.” (She has a wry eye for human peculiarities: “It’s interesting, our desire to move giant pieces of earth and rock into our homes, at great expense.”)

The living room of the Roscoe mountain house—stacked stones inside and out.FLOTO+WARNER.

The vignettes “are a metaphor for what architects have to do all the time,” Coulson says. “They build these beautiful places and then they have to let people live in them. In some ways, these stories are me living in Elizabeth’s work.”

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