Tempo Office | The spirit of the times

Just a few steps from the most beautiful view of the Lower Manhattan skyline, a young Montreal design firm has created an interior where time seems to stand still. This loft, housed in a century-old home in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood, invites you to escape urban pressure thanks to effects borrowed from the world of fashion by Bureau Tempo.

In a living room of the recently renovated 150-square-meter loft, a large painting, resembling a fresco or wallpaper, reproduces, with a touch of poetry, a scene from Prospect Park, where the owner likes to go with her dog Rhubarb. The artist, Melody Lockerman, depicted walkers in shades of cream and green that blend into the decor. Hanging the work high up allows it to be seen from afar. This addition reflects a desire to create a space where one can catch one’s breath away from the hustle and bustle of the city. “Our client wanted a quiet retreat between two days of work,” summarizes Adam Robinson, founder of Bureau Tempo, who is signing his first residential project here thanks to the recommendation of a Canadian client.

Cover the places

The designer, originally from Saskatchewan, drew inspiration from his seven years spent in a loft on De Gaspé Avenue in Montreal to model his project in Brooklyn.

From his time at the Atelier Zébulon Perron, known for its elegant restaurants and bars, he has also retained a heightened attention to detail. He did not hesitate to draw from the owner’s wardrobe for colors and material effects that he transposed into the new decor nestled in a red sandstone house from the early 20th century.^e century of Brooklyn Heights, a neighborhood where the most beautiful brownstones from New York.

In the kitchen, a checkerboard floor made of pink and white clay tiles extends an old wooden floor weathered by the previous occupants. The restored furniture has been painted in a soft green, oscillating between pistachio and sage throughout the day, thanks to large windows opening onto a terrace. A warm salmon shade also coats the walls, the door and the radiator of the mistress of the house’s bedroom. And multi-coloured furniture punctuates a neutral and textured background thanks to lime coverings and wooden slats for the walls whose vertical lines correspond to a ceiling height of 3.4 metres.

Fallback zone

The owner reserved a corner of the loft for her guests to spend the night. Thanks to the intervention of Bureau Tempo, movable partitions made of wood and fluted glass define an office space where a bed is hidden, built into a wall that can be deployed and completed with bedside tables housed in a bookcase drawer. This versatile area is one of the many tricks Adam Robinson used to structure the living area. There are also colorful rugs of generous dimensions, as well as voluminous suspensions to illuminate it, as many invitations to move around in the space.

Here and there, a few Quebec touches appear in the decor, like the old kitchen cabinets, a print of which allowed us to trace the manufacturer in Canada, or the flooring in the room selected from the Montreal brand Arta. “Brooklyn shares a lot of similarities with Montreal,” notes Adam Robinson. “While I was faced with some logistical challenges, at the end of this project, I found myself on familiar ground,” concludes the man who has just completed a project on a private island in Georgian Bay, Ontario, with designer Thom Fougere, another young Quebec talent from the Prairies.

Visit the Bureau Tempo website