Orley House is a 19th-century Boerum Hill townhouse that has almost nothing in common with the other 19th-century Boerum Hill townhouses. The bones are period-correct — carved marble mantels, deep parlor windows, original moldings and the mahogany entry door — and almost everything applied to them is not.
Rooms are treated as distinct color worlds: green plaster wraps the kitchen and breakfast nook, saffron lacquer takes over the bar, terracotta covers the family room, and cobalt mosaic tile runs wall-to-wall through the bath. Red lacquer niches punctuate the dining room, while a dressing room is built around glossy butterscotch millwork. Elsewhere, burl wood, soapstone, rosso terrazzo, patterned upholstery and unexpected flashes of lilac, pink and blue keep changing the register from room to room.
The interventions are bold, but the original architecture is never erased. Formal openings, high ceilings and long sightlines still organize the house, giving all of that color somewhere to sit. Almost nothing repeats, and very little feels cautious. It reads as one house and photographs as ten.
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