An invited room at the 2022 Brooklyn Heights Designer Showhouse — a jewel-box sitting room built on hand-painted chinoiserie, brass, and navy velvet, photographed and published citywide.
Each year, the Brooklyn Heights Designer Showhouse invites a small group of the neighborhood's most respected designers to transform a historic brownstone room by room. Circa22 was asked to take on a sitting room — no client, no brief, just the rare chance to design purely as a statement of point of view.
A showhouse room lives or dies on memorability — it has to stop visitors mid-walkthrough and photograph beautifully from every angle. But the best rooms resist pure spectacle: ours needed to feel like a real home someone could actually live in, not a stage set built for a single afternoon.
We built the room outward from a hand-painted chinoiserie mural in soft plaster-pink, a custom backdrop that set the palette for everything else. Brass bamboo-dome table lamps and a curved navy velvet sofa brought warmth and a hint of drama; sculptural ceramics, a round sunburst mirror, and an upholstered swing/bench added texture and a note of wit. Warm woods throughout kept the whole room grounded.
The finished room was widely photographed by Tom Benedict Photography and featured across Aspire Metro, Brownstoner, and Chairish — a compact but complete distillation of the Circa22 point of view: warmth, craft, and quiet confidence, all in one jewel box of a space.
“This jewel-box room went on to be photographed in full by Tom Benedict Photography and featured across Aspire Metro, Brownstoner, and Chairish — proof that a space built purely on point of view can still find its audience.”As featured in Aspire · Brownstoner · Chairish