GRAPHĒ: Before & After: Just Wait for the "Juicy" Pool Tile Covering a Bathroom in This Brooklyn Brownstone

Add it to the list of playful moves by O-N Architects in the renovated family home, which includes a mural by a tattoo artist and an aluminum bar with a party trick.

The fireplace was redesigned as a piece of sculpture, in order to be more inviting to sit around. It's accompanied by an Onn Pendant by a-emotional light at the ceiling, and a custom wall-mounted shelving unit designed by O-N Architecture, built by Felix Chmiel, and coated in pigments by Linolie & Pigment.

Irene Chung and Davis Owen, cofounders of O-N Architects, don’t mind if you call their work a little strange. "We like to create spaces that feel five degrees off of what you expect," says Owen. "Things that require you to take a second look."

Consider this recently completed brownstone renovation in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood, in Brooklyn. Its owners, a couple with young children, asked for room-specific solutions to a few problems they were having. On the main floor, a fireplace in the dining room was defunct, while one in the living room had a faux-classical facade that wasn’t welcoming anyone for a fireside chat. Downstairs, they needed a guest suite for visiting relatives, while upstairs, both bathrooms felt cramped.

Chung and Owen, in collaboration with architect Francis Aguillard, who consulted on the design, started the renovation with research. One of their clients is German and the other is a born-and-raised New Yorker, so first they went macro, looking at "the history of design and building culture in both countries" around the time of the brownstone’s 1910s construction, says Owen. This had them delving into the Bauhaus movement as well as the speculative development of brownstones, which were built in repetition with a high level of craftsmanship, and thinking about ways to marry the two.