Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic One might presume that an aesthete like Mary Rozell could procure any painting or fixture her heart desires for the 1876 Italianate brownstone she shares with her husband in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. In fact, the art lawyer and art historian, who has been the global head of UBS’s art collection for the past decade, often finds things right on the sidewalk. “People might not think I’m a scavenger,” laughs Rozell, but “first of all, I can’t afford the art in the UBS collection. We are essentially operating a museum of sorts.” The Swiss bank has collected more than 45,000 artworks since the 1960s — including by Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, Jeffrey Gibson and Alicja Kwade — displayed in 700 offices and public exhibitions around the world.Rozell’s own home is eclectic, combining bohemian heirlooms with art by German contemporary artists. “I also like to recycle pieces, and have a lot of decor from flea markets, through Etsy, on eBay,” she says. And yes: “off the streets — very Brooklyn”.Once an elegant Gilded Age residence with staff quarters, the house had endured various permutations by the time Rozell bought it in 2011. “It had been stripped of much of its original detail, including ornate ceiling moulding and walnut panelling, as well as the original doors on both the garden and parlour levels,” Rozell says.Above the coat rack hangs a glass sign reading “Edwards Dining Hall”, which Rozell found in the basement. During the Depression, the brownstone’s stoop was removed to make way for a restaurant to serve nearby Navy Yard workers. Later, the property became affordable housing, with individual rooms for rent. Walt Whitman wrote ‘Leaves of Grass’ nearby. Patti Smith lived with Robert Mapplethorpe on the next street overIn the 1970s, a local architect acquired the building and made a series of “unfortunate hippie changes”, says Rozell. Walls were stripped to expose the brick, with some “replaced by curious wooden beams and orange Plexiglas”. Pre-renovation photos show a solid metal front door, with a peephole that she describes as a remnant of the house’s location at “ground zero of [New York’s] crack wars of the 1980s and 1990s”.But when Rozell and her husband, a publishing lawyer, found the space, they had a vision. “We had looked all over Manhattan and Brooklyn and various suburbs,” she recalls. “But I was very taken with Clinton Hill’s rich history, exceptional diversity and the grandeur of its architecture, which is still largely intact.” Originally developed as a rural hilltop escape, dubbed Brooklyn’s Gold Coast, it contains a number of late 19th-century mansions and the Pratt Institute School of Art’s campus. “Walt Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass nearby,” says Rozell. In 1967, “Patti Smith lived with Robert Mapplethorpe on the next street over.”Today, the interior reflects a balance between preservation and Rozell’s interest in contemporary culture and modern art. She has a fear of Victorian overload, she says: “You want to keep the history but freshen it up. [But] the other big concern for me is waste and wanting to preserve things. There are a lot of things I would not have chosen, like furniture I took from my family house in Upstate New York. You just reupholster them.”In the kitchen, Rozell envisioned adding a window with a sink beneath and a Poul Henningsen PH-5 pendant overhead. When the vintage model arrived from Craigslist, the lamp was violet, not white as it looked online. She pivoted, remembering the indigo of her childhood bedroom in the Adirondack foothills. She installed pale blue Corian counters, alongside an Eero Saarinen Tulip table and matching purple bouclé-clad stools. Lavender cushions accent the breakfast nook, upholstered in 1958 fabric by Swedish Modernist architect Sven Markelius, bought at a Stockholm auction. Over the island hangs an east German train station clock, found on a family trip.“It was through legal work, as an art lawyer, that I got into restitution cases, which started me really thinking about German art,” says Rozell. A huge influence was seeing the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 1991 exhibition Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, a forensic reproduction of the Nazi party’s 1937 Munich exhibition.I don’t want marble countertops everywhere. I just don’t like fancy things“It had a big impact on me . . . I got really [fascinated by] that period of history.” She first visited Germany in January 1992: “Reunification was just the November before. I travelled by myself in the freezing cold. I was stunned by what was happening there. It changed my life, and I thought, ‘I have to be here.’” Rozell became deeply immersed in the country’s past, from the Holocaust to the cold war, and the country’s 20th-century art, inspiring her to enrol at the Courtauld in London to study German Expressionist art. She then lived in Germany from 1994 to 2000. After returning to the US, Rozell worked for Sotheby’s before starting her current role in 2015. As chief curator of UBS’s collection, she visits fairs and galleries around the world to decide which artworks to acquire, as well as how best to engage the public, clients and employees globally. This means she has regular opportunities to stay in the apartment near Viktoria-Luise-Platz in Berlin’s Schöneberg neighbourhood that she has owned for nearly 25 years.True to her interests, Rozell’s personal collection is anchored by modern German artists. A trio of Bernd and Hilla Becher photographs line the first-floor hallway. But Rozell contrasts their austere images of fading industrial landscapes with a graphic Chinoiserie wallpaper. In the open living room, a large-scale photo by Düsseldorf-based Thomas Ruff hangs near an antique dining set inherited from her husband’s family, and a mid-century American walnut sideboard from eBay. This richly layered approach defines Rozell’s style.“I know the feelings I want to create. I want each room to feel different, but I want there to be a thread, a connection,” she explains. “I go down these little rabbit holes with different things, every fixture, every knob. I like to have very simple basics. It starts off pretty minimal, because I want the objects to do the talking. I don’t like luxury, per se.”In the library-den African masks, antique Chinese bamboo bird cages, and baskets from travels in Botswana can be found. The third-floor guest room is serene, with exposed beams, white shutters and a 19th-century French campaign bed. Rozell updated its upholstery, adding embroidered Otomi pillows from Mexico City.“This desk chair in here was $5 from a Cape Cod street sale, and the poster over the fireplace I bought in 1995 for 5 Deutsche marks [about £2.20] at the Berlin Gemäldegalerie,” she says. “One of my favourite hotels was in the Dolomites. It was just wood and white sheets, the balcony and the mountains. I don’t want marble countertops everywhere. I just don’t like fancy things.”Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
