A Living Legacy

Lindsey and Mike have brought a handsome and once downtrodden Brooklyn brownstone back to life and created a family home to last for generations to come.

- Serena Fokschaner

Property is encoded in Lindsey Branca’s DNA. Her grandmother Inez, a feisty, far-sighted Italian from the Bronx, founded the family’s commercial property business in the late Forties. ‘She’d read that construction was doing well so she made my grandfather quit his job as a lawyer to set up the company with her,’ says Lindsey. ‘As it wasn’t acceptable for women to be in business, my Pop Pop went to the meetings, but she really ran the company until she was 90.’ For Lindsey, whose father now heads up the business, school holidays were spent in hard hats on building sites or perched at an office desk annotating blueprints and eavesdropping on conversations about the importance of budgets – and damp-proofing.

The discovery of a neglected Brooklyn brownstone allowed Lindsey to put that learning into practice. ‘We’d been looking for a property in the area for a year when I spotted this one online,’ says Lindsey, who now runs a residential design business with her partner, Mike Grosshandler. ‘It was a holiday weekend, everyone was away, so we seized the moment to visit.’