Like many young families, Cambria Brockman, her husband, and their two little boys moved out of the city to the burbs at the start of the pandemic. In addition to its pretty, fenced-in yard, their Newburyport home has a generously sized third-floor office. It was a major selling point for Brockman’s husband, who was now working from home. 

But how to furnish it? “We only had a desk and a chair in this beautiful room, so it was very echoey,” says Brockman, a wedding photographer-turned-novelist. “We like things to be cozy.” Unsure of the best approach, she reached out to Kate Daskalakis of KSD Designs.

To take advantage of the room’s size, Brockman asked Daskalakis to outfit the slope-ceilinged space with a desk and a sitting area where she could join her husband with her laptop (working from home can be lonely), and where the little ones could play. “We often had to watch the kids at the same time as we were working,” Brockman says. In terms of style, she thought it should veer more masculine than the rest of the light and airy interiors. She was thinking dark green to up the cozy factor and bring the outdoors in for her husband, who is athletic and outdoorsy.

Daskalakis loved the ideas. “Our work tends toward the feminine side, so it was fun for us to lean into a masculine look,” the Newbury-based designer says. She started by painting three walls in Benjamin Moore’s Vintage Vogue, a deep smoky green; the board and batten, other millwork, and ceiling remain white. “I left it white behind his desk so that alcove wouldn’t feel like a cave,” Daskalakis says. “All dark green would have felt stifling.”