Gimme Shelter: The Homes of 8 Brooklyn Professionals
Sometimes you enter a person’s home and have no idea what his or her story is.
And maybe you don’t even care. But other times? Other times, you feel like you’re not just entering a person’s home, but that you’re also entering his or her life. Such is the case with the Greenpoint home of jewelry designer Pamela Love and her husband, illustrator Matthew Nelson. It’s a testament to her unique design sensibility, which she describes as “eclectic, a little bohemian with a little bit of a Gothic feel, but also a lot of elements of the Southwest.” The apartment is furnished with many vintage finds (the couple love to go antique shopping in Nelson’s native North Carolina), but is also home to many things they built themselves, including an impressive wood-and-rope bookcase that they fashioned from reclaimed wood from Build It Green. Love bought the apartment eight years ago, when she rode her bike past it and noticed that the building was for sale. “My father had just passed away, and I had some money from selling his house,” she says, “and I thought, why would I use that money for anything other than a down payment? Otherwise I would have just wasted it.” Instead of wasting it, Love has built a lovely home full of things that hold a great deal of meaning to her. When we asked her our most exasperating question (“What would you save in a fire?”), Love—after guaranteeing her cat’s safety—tells us, “There are so many things that I love. I’d probably be stuck in the fire, figuring out what to save. But there is one thing. It’s a little cabinet I made that’s a shrine to my dad. It holds all these bottles that we collected. This is the one thing I would save in a fire. Although all the bottles would probably fall off.” It’s a beautiful cabinet—and a beautiful sentiment—and truly indicative of the life and home that Love has created in the last eight years, collecting, preserving and surrounding herself with the many things that have meaning to her, all of them special in their own right.
Photos by Austin McAllister
