HOW TO LURE A NEW YORKER TO NEW JERSEY?
- Rose Bennett Gilbert
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Major renovation of a ’30s classic makes Maplewood feel like home
Written by Rose Bennett Gilbert; Photography by Mike Van Tassell
They were still barely married when Greg Lembrich first pitched the idea of moving to New Jersey to his wife, Alexandra Carter, an avowed “forever New Yorker who hated New Jersey from afar.”
You can imagine the negotiations that would follow, finally leading them from a tiny apartment in Hell’s Kitchen to the elegant 3,900-square-foot Tudor house on Sagamore Road in Maplewood they now call home. Carter, the director of the Columbia Law School Mediation Clinic, is a renowned professional negotiator. She has even written a Wall Street Journal bestseller on the art of negotiating, titled Ask for More.
In contrast, Lembrich had grown up in the small town of Branchburg, New Jersey, in Somerset County, where his father had been the mayor and his mother a Somerset County court supervisor. He and Carter met at Columbia Law School.
A native Long Islander, Carter enjoyed the big city hustle and bustle. “Our New York neighborhood had a taxicab depot. The Central Park carriage horses came home there at night,” she says. “I’d gotten used to the city noises,” but not to their cramped living quarters. Lembrich, who had already begun running the numbers on buying a larger apartment, “quickly realized we could have a whole house in New Jersey for what a two-bedroom apartment would cost in New York.”
His wife was unmoved. Vividly, she envisioned the horrors of “The Commute! Packed trains! Me being crammed up against the train door. If it flew open I’d fly out!”
So began the negotiations. “I wanted to make it really difficult for my husband,” Carter says. She drew up a long list of demands to be met before she would give in to her husband’s reasoning. She’d need a direct train to New York and an older home, pre-1940, “in a diverse, liberal, multicultural community.” Oh, and there had to be at least one Ethiopian restaurant nearby.
Maplewood and Montclair made the cut. But Maplewood won out, thanks to local real estate agent Priscilla Egan, who found the vintage Tudor. Built in 1930 with attention to details such as oak beams, iron-framed casement windows and bespoke brickwork, the house checked all Carter’s boxes. Plus, just down the mountain in South Orange there was Walia, a well-reviewed Ethiopian restaurant named after the Walia ibex found only in the northern mountains of Ethiopia.
Bingo.! They moved in during 2007. “We scrounged everywhere for the money to buy the house, but we had no furniture,” Carter says. “We’re city people. We sat on the floor in the living room surrounded by takeout.”
Eventually they gathered some bargain furnishings, shopping at outlet stores and online. “We furnished the living room for $750,” Carter says. But then life got busier. Daughter Caroline arrived in 2010. Lembrich, a lawyer at New York Life Insurance Co., immersed himself in community service, including two terms on the Maplewood Township Committee and helping facilitate the merger of Maplewood and South Orange firefighting services into the South Essex Fire Department.
Years after their move-in they were still living with their bargain furniture and the eccentricities of a near-century-old home.
To the rescue: Idea Space Architecture & Design of Maplewood, headed by interior designer Julie China and architect husband Darren China.
Julie and Alex had met through Stand Up! Girls, a nonprofit designed to hone communication skills for girls from underserved communities. It wasn’t long before their casual conversations hit home, literally.
Up on Sagamore Road, “things were beginning to fall apart,” Julie says. “Alex and Greg are very busy people, very social people who wanted to entertain but didn’t feel comfortable in the house as it was. They mostly hung out in a small room on the first floor. They didn’t use their living room much. The kitchen was at the front of the house. There was no cohesion, no sense of design.”
With the China design and architecture team showing the way, the restoration project turned into a months-long gut renovation. Step one was to ask the homeowners themselves to isolate and illustrate their personal tastes on inspiration boards, pasting up clippings from magazines and laying out samples of their favorite colors. “They loved doing the boards,” Julie says. Even so, Lembrich “had not been on board for the renovation,” his wife says. “He didn’t like change … but now he loves it.”
Credit for Lembrich’s capitulation may belong to his new living room that features not just one but two outsized screens. One is 65 inches and the other 42, mounted on a sliding device on a bookcase wall. It’s a clever bit of now-you-see- it-now-you-don’t sleight-of-hand, so Lembrich can watch two sports events at the same time.
“It’s his own sports bar at home,” Carter quips. “It also saved my marriage!”
Meanwhile, demolition day arrived, upending home life for the next few months. The family retreated to the third floor and created a makeshift kitchen in the basement with a microwave and toaster oven. The old kitchen gave way to family-friendly additions: a mud room and a new bath, conveniently located just inside the back door. The new and bright all black-and-white kitchen is centered by an enormous island.
“The best thing about the renovation,” says Carter, “I love my new kitchen. It’s where my daughter Caroline and I hang out when she comes home from school in the afternoon.”
The new kitchen also boasts a magnificent black and brass classic French stove from La Cornue and what may be the most generous storage room in Essex County: rows and rows of storage shelves in what Caroline calls a “secret pantry.”
A friend came to see her new kitchen, Carter says with a small smile. The friend’s reaction: “Now I’ll never be happy again!”
Meanwhile, the Idea Space team had been creating the sense of cohesion and design they promised. They found new furnishings to add a touch of contemporary cool to the warm, traditional attitude inherent in the 96-year-old home. And they brought in contractor Will Murphy of Axios Construction, a Port Murphy-based specialist in high-end renovations, to salvage the old casement windows and build a Tudor arch between the new kitchen and the dining room to match a ‘30s original. Axios also widened the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room and releveled the entire first floor to keep things on the square and eliminate squeaking floorboards (aka “a cheap alarm system,” Murphy quipped).
Detailing their home inside and out required more patience and much closer attention than the homeowners could have foreseen. “Once we started digging in, we discovered a lot of issues to be addressed,” Lembrich says.
But all the worry, work, dust and fuss paid off the very first Thanksgiving after the great makeover was complete, as Carter reports with glee: “We had 22 guests for dinner!”
Rose Bennett Gilbert has spent her journalist career interviewing astronauts, artists, authors and the occasional miscreant, and still believes the best stories begin at HOME.