Home Tour: Brooklyn Apartment

The Apartment

The charming, one-bedroom apartment is located in Brooklyn, New York, and draws its inspiration from two Manhattan yarn and fabric shops the resident owns.

Home Tour: Brooklyn Apartment

The Shop Owner

Joelle Hoverson (above) and her sister Jennifer opened their shop Purl in 2002 and Purl Patchwork in 2006.

Visit Purl online

Home Tour: Brooklyn Apartment

The Living Room

It's this sun-dappled space that made Joelle first fall in love with the apartment. Using old and new items she loved, Joelle filled the room with favorite pieces: a hooked stool cover she framed and hung, her parents' perfectly faded hand-me-down rug, a mid-century string chair from an antiques store.

Home Tour: Brooklyn Apartment

The Dining Area

Joelle created a dining table from legs found on the street, which she loved for their French modern feel; a friend made the oval top and painted it with several coats of white lacquer.

Home Tour: Brooklyn Apartment

The Home Office

Living in a small, rented apartment, Joelle tries to keep things compact and portable. A friend's design firm turned an old armoire into a mini home office, fitting it out with shelves, cubbies, and drawers. The doors keep it discreet.

Home Tour: Brooklyn Apartment

The Office Inspiration

The armoire's inspiration was this bookcase above, which Joelle found, abandoned, in a former apartment. She thinks it was originally  a music center; now it displays her absolute favorite books and an assemblage of objects in black, brown, and white, including a tag-sale handblown glass hurricane lamp, prints picked up at junk and antiques shops, brown Wedgwood pitchers, and a lacy frond of seaweed.

Home Tour: Brooklyn Apartment

The Crafts Room

In addition to housing her sewing and knitting tools, Joelle also houses her fabrics, stacked neatly on a shelf unit that looks like a built-in. A Homasote board for project planning is covered with cotton batting; fabric swatches stick to it without pins.

Home Tour: Brooklyn Apartment

The Bedroom

Joelle painted the walls in the palest pink and took off from there. Even the art -- a painting found at a French flea market, a piece from her collection of copper lusterware -- was chosen for its pink-friendly hues. The pink of perfection, though, is the quilt she made from reproduction 19th-century fabrics.

Quilt How-To

Home Tour: Brooklyn Apartment

Bedroom Details

For a headboard, she covered a piece of foam with one of the fabrics used in the quilt.

Home Tour: Brooklyn Apartment

The Nursery

Awaiting the arrival of the little girl she's adopting from China, Joelle thought about how she would make the apartment work for two people. She transformed a nook off the bedroom into a nursery, separating the spaces by installing a curtain on an easy-pull hospital track and pumping up the pink.

Home Tour: Brooklyn Apartment

The Wardrobe

On the wardrobe, she used a Liberty-print curtain instead of a door, which would have jutted out into the tiny room.

Home Tour: Brooklyn Apartment

Favorite Pieces

Joelle found this hooked stool cover and chose to frame and hang the fabric on the wall in her living room.

Home Tour: Brooklyn Apartment

Purl Soho

Joelle's downtown Manhattan yarn store helped make knitting a hobby as likely to be practiced by models killing time on shoots as by grandmas producing booties.

Purl Soho

Home Tour: Brooklyn Apartment

Color Wall

Walking into Purl is like entering a giant box of crayons. Floor-to-ceiling shelves in a clear-finished light wood are stocked with yarns in a spectrum of vivid hues.

Home Tour: Brooklyn Apartment

Finished Products

A selection of knit caps and scarves sits on an oval table in Joelle's Purl Soho shop.

Home Tour: Brooklyn Apartment

Purl Patchwork

Color also reigns at the sisters' second shop, a few doors down from Purl.

Visit Purl Patchwork

Home Tour: Brooklyn Apartment

Fabric Heaven

At Purl Patchwork, shelves are stacked with a dizzying array of sewing and quilting fabrics, including period reproductions, imported embroidered cloth, and contemporary designers' lines.

Home Tour: Brooklyn Apartment

Window Dressing

In the shop window, balls of thread are displayed in jars like big jawbreakers. The Hoversons also have a Purl Bee crafting blog, which Joelle calls the third store. On it she posts free patterns for some of the pieces that are shown in the store and on display in her home. There are also online tutorials for those who want to turn their own homes into handmade havens.

Visit Purl Bee