Miranda Brooks & Bastien Halard
Shaded by a crab apple tree, the pretty carriage house at the end of the garden is where Miranda has her offices.
As I walked to Miranda Brooks and Bastien Halard’s house in Brooklyn a man was vacuum-cleaning the street outside? As it transpires, it had nothing to do with Miranda’s household arrangements, but I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if it had, as her four-story brownstone with its “humble elegance” (in John Fowler’s famous phrase) is immaculate.
Everything about and around Miranda Brooks is good-looking, including her house, her children and her French architect husband. Well, good-looking is an understatement. Banked-up beautiful would be more accurate.
She has been practicing as a landscape architect and garden designer since 1991 (Miranda Brooks Landscape Design) and is a contributing editor to Vogue. She runs her practice out of the pretty carriage house at the back of the house across the garden, planted with glorious abundance so that you thread your way through greenery and color to reach the offices where her garden designers work.
She may seem coolness itself, but she is an inspired garden designer and gets under the skin of the gardens she makes. If you analyzed her character from her gardens she is not at all cool, but passionate, voluptuous, lavish, abundant, and often grand, without ever being too formal. She has a subtle, painterly approach laid over strict underlying design. It may all seem spontaneous, romantic, pastoral, but she keeps any plant making a run for it on a tight rein. Practical aspects are priorities. Cut paths may meander freely through whispering long grass – but that grass doesn’t get overgrown.
A knowledgeable plantswoman, she also has a percipient eye for landscape and perspective and is able to visualize the long-term result of her planting. Her gardens are to be lived in, not just looked at. The artist and cleric William Gilpin wrote in a letter in 1769, “I have had a dispute lately – on an absurd vulgar opinion which holds that we see with our eyes whereas I assent that our eyes are only mere glass windows and we see with our imagination.” This Miranda does. For example, the bewitching series of mature secret gardens for Anna Wintour that have evolved under her care over twenty years reveals a rampant visual imagination. She tells me that someone once said to her about gardening: “It’s an awful profession in a way . . . It’s like being an interior decorator whose furniture dies.” Though she laughs, she agrees. “You do really have to love it to do it.”
She learned to love it when she was made to work in the garden after school in the evenings for a year at her parents’ farm in Hertfordshire, as a punishment. For? “For doing something terrible!” Far from its being a penance, she immediately knew this was to be something special in her life. She took a degree in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, a postgraduate degree in landscape architecture at the University of Birmingham, and then worked for that doyenne of garden designers Arabella Lennox-Boyd, before starting out on her own.
The house is in Boerum Hill, opposite a basketball stadium and a social housing project. The area was snidely described in the New York Times as “the aspirational space of the year . . . an idealized backdrop for the chattering classes . . . here are all the trappings of the suburban good life and the attendant complexities.”
Be that as it may, there is nothing suburban about Miranda and Bastien’s international bohemian house; but it was far from that when they found it on Craigslist. As soon as Bastien clapped eyes on it he called Miranda to tell her not to bother to make the journey from Manhattan: “It won’t do, the garden is too small . . . It’s opposite the projects.” But she and her brother Sebastian had already started out and when she saw the pretty carriage house at the bottom of the garden – though it wasn’t a garden then, covered as it was in solid paving stones – the deal was clinched. Now, far from disliking the projects opposite, she would rather have their open playing spaces opposite her house than other buildings. “It gives us complete privacy,” she says, “though sometimes when a game is on the children can hear some pretty choice language floating up!”
There was a lot to do before they could move in: the main house was divided into multiple dwellings and the entry passage to the house behind ran right through it. “The conversion only took eight months,” Miranda says, “and I don’t know how Bastien did it. But it was urgent. We had two-year-old Poppy and Grey was a baby and we simply had no room in the house where we were living.”
Her husband, being a sympathetic architect with strict ideas about how he likes houses to look, knew just what to do. His wide knowledge of furniture, architecture and decoration was imbued in him in what sounds like a gorgeously creative childhood in France. His great-grandfather Adolphe Halard founded Nobilis, the French fabric and wallpaper company; his grandfather Yves Halard, and his wife, the decorator Michelle Halard, started their own interior design firm. Nowhere much to run with that background – although run he did, and fetched up in New York, where he met Miranda at a dinner party and that was that. She’s got a pretty good design pool too. Her father is an architect and a don at Cambridge and her mother, a psychologist, lives with her dogs in Colorado (“a very cool exterior hiding a deeply romantic interior,” says Miranda).
“The least expensive way of making something nice is to keep the charm of it,” Bastien says. He hates fake traditional. He preserved the staircase, exposed the ceiling joists downstairs to give height, and designed and built a lot of the furniture in the house. And, of course, both of them have oodles of that dreaded quality, taste. It wasn’t all easy going. Miranda says, “Our builders worked on it without much reading of plans.”
“Oh, they read plans,” Bastien says, “but sometimes they read them upside down. Once when I arrived they had erected a pillar not only in the wrong room but also upside down.”
Miranda did all the colors in the house. She bought the paint from the wondrous Papers and Paints shop in London’s Fulham Road, and discovered how different New York light is from English light. “Unbelievably so. The pale green willow walls in the girls’ bathroom turned into a dark green, and the whites just looked gloomy.” No evidence here – this house is luminous.
One can see that the interior is a result of a combination of unusual factors . . . Miranda’s very English sensibility, Bastien’s cosmopolitan Frenchness, their lives as New Yorkers, their two different businesses, and their growing children. So, two designers doing the same house? How did that play out?
In the airy sitting room with its high exposed-joist ceiling, pictures cover the walls. To the left of the fireplace mirror is a photograph by François Halard; to the right, from left, a photograph by Adam Fuss above a painting by Simone Shubuck, two pictures by Christopher Brooks, and a portrait by Dan McCarthy. The modern chair and table were made by Bastien.
Bastien also designed and made the couple’s bed, which they wanted, says Miranda, to be vast enough “to fit everyone.” Behind, in the custom-made De Gournay “Tree of Life” wallpaper, doves nestle in the branches as they do in the garden outside.
“There was a certain amount of argument,” she says, dryly, “so we designated floors. The French could win arguments on the first floor, the English got to win on the children’s floor, and the combination of the two made it easier on the top floor, where the bathroom doubles as a library and sitting room. Yes, there were disagreements – whether the loo should be in the bathroom or in a small back room blocking the light. Bastien, being French, wanted the small dark room.” There isn’t a small dark room.
It’s a lovely bathroom, conducive to relaxation and chat, and they spend time up here in the evening after work. An eighteenth-century Swedish carved bench was Miranda’s first buy at auction and Bastien built the bookshelves and painted the tub a deep blue to match the indigo curtains (dyed by Miranda). A Gerrit Rietveld pendant light much loved by Bastien hangs above.
Their adjacent bedroom, through the dressing room past an ottoman covered in a Japanese boro, is a pastoral dream rimmed with light, a crab apple tree knocking at the window. The looking glass over the fireplace opposite the bed was found in a flea market, and the bed is big. Big. Bastien carved its headboard from a solid maple tree trunk; behind it a panoramic stretch of De Gournay “Tree of Life” wallpaper echoes the flowery spread of the crab apple.
The children’s artwork covers one whole wall in the open, colorful playroom.
A vase filled with anemones sits on the low playroom table, made by Bastien, whose shelves are full of coloring books.
The second floor is devoted to the children’s room – and this house is filled with children and their accoutrements: gleanings of their drawings lie on a kitchen table next to muffins baked by Poppy (delicious). The wall-sized notice board in the central playroom is covered in their artistic efforts, and their bedrooms are rural retreats papered with hand-blocked lino prints by the London-based artist Marthe Armitage – chestnut trees for Grey, and a mingling of images of butterflies, birds and cobwebs for Poppy. This place is full of creativity – cooking, dancing, dressing up, painting, planning.
Much of it takes place in the kitchen, a long room, stretching from the windows overlooking the street to the view over the luxuriant garden behind. There’s a nacreous gleam to it, an effect heightened by the limed beamed ceiling and the limed floor of white oak, giving it a Provençal air. The countertop, nearly 40 feet long, is also made from old white oak and above it hangs a buoyant gallery of paintings and drawings, a kind of anthology of work done by friends, including paintings by Christopher Brooks (Miranda’s ex-husband), drawings by their friend Dan McCarthy and by their neighbors Elliott Puckette and Hugo Guinness and photographs by Adam Fuss, another friend. The watercolors are by the gifted botanical artist Emma Tennant, who grew up at Chatsworth and has written, “I cannot remember a time when I was not interested in both gardening and painting. I must have been born with a trowel in one hand and a paintbrush in the other” – which sounds very like Miranda.
In the middle of the room a drowsy Beldi keep tabs on the activity – no hint that she was rescued as a starving puppy found in Morocco, and that to get her here involved a Byzantine journey via Egypt. She lives in peace with the girls’ cats, Caliban and Tempette.
The glory of the house is what Miranda has created on her rooftop – a proper garden, with a pergola and a vegetable plot, rampant with lettuce and carrots and a little bothy like something out of a fairy tale where the family and friends had candlelit suppers on balmy Brooklyn nights among the garden scents. But a snitchy neighbor informed the planning people of the little hidden shack, and they had to remove it. As soon as they get planning permission back up it goes, a labor of love. The girls have a quadrant of garden up there and they harvest the vegetables they have planted and tended.
They have fantasies about buying the house next door and extending laterally so that everything is twice the size it is now. “It’s a complete fantasy,” Miranda says. “This is the best family house. You hear coming down the stairwell the sound of children laughing, your work people are straight across the garden. If I were asked to describe it? I would say it is a happy house.”
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT On the left of the bathroom’s central window is a portrait by Dan McCarthy; on the right, a photograph by Mark Borthwick above a drawing by Hugo Guinness; the iconic hanging light is by Gerrit Rietveld. On the mantelpiece in the main bedroom are a drawing by Emma Tennant and a Russian icon of St Nicholas. Caliban, the ragdoll cat, descends the original, reclaimed staircase. In Poppy’s bedroom, wallpaper hand-blocked with butterflies, birds and cobwebs.