Roberts also specializes in historic renovation—a necessary niche for the owners of 18th- and 19th-century buildings you’re likely to find in Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope. “I’ve always thought of Elizabeth as a house whisperer. She seems able to intuit the unseen forces in the past of a project: how loved or unsolved or misunderstood a structure has been and exactly what it needs to infuse it with new life,” writes Wendy Goodman in the book’s foreword. “Elizabeth creates character and purpose within a space that first and foremost invites comfort, ease, relaxation, and enjoyment.” (Although you don’t need to be invited into one of her homes to appreciate her work: Roberts transformed a 1927 auto-repair shop into the Rachel Comey store in SoHo, and a parking lot into the Brooklyn Museum’s sculpture garden.)
Ahead of the publication of her book, Roberts shares with Vogue a never-before-seen project of hers: a Catskills mountain house in Roscoe, New York. Like most of her projects, it has a rich story behind it—the land boasted a centuries-old wall that sparked Roberts’s imagination. “These 200-plus-year-old walls were from left over from farming,” she says. “I aligned the house them because it had just the perfect orientation of views.” The result? An effortless, clean structure that slopes from the old crumbling stones into the hill and lake below.
