Landscape design for 144 Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn, as featured in The New York Times.
Designed by Marie Salembier and Rewild Landscape, 144 Vanderbilt Avenue in Fort Greene, Brooklyn brings rewilding principles to one of the borough's most-discussed contemporary residential buildings — the pink-facade development covered by The New York Times in 2024 ("The Pink Building That Is Changing Fort Greene") in collaboration with architecture firm SO–IL.
The 8-story development comprises 26 residences with more than 11,000 square feet of shared outdoor space, including a sixth-floor Sky Garden with Manhattan views, a Sunken Garden near the lobby entrance, and private terrace gardens on select units. Rewild's role spans street-level planting through these terrace gardens, integrating native and naturalistic plant communities with the building's architectural identity. Where many high-profile residential projects default to ornamental plantings, 144 Vanderbilt was conceived from the outset as a site where ecological function and design refinement should reinforce one another. Layered perennials, native grasses, and pollinator-supporting species extend the building's footprint into the streetscape, supporting urban biodiversity and creating year-round seasonal interest visible from sidewalk and terrace alike.
The project demonstrates a thesis Marie's studio has refined across its NYC, Hamptons, and international work: that residential landscape design at any scale benefits from being treated as a living ecological system rather than a static visual amenity. Soil composition, microclimate, hydrology, and the surrounding Fort Greene urban context all informed the plant palette. The terrace gardens were composed to mature meaningfully across seasons and years, not to look "finished" on installation day.
The New York Times coverage situates 144 Vanderbilt as a Fort Greene landmark and a signal of how the neighborhood's residential identity is shifting. Rewild's contribution to that shift is the landscape itself — a working demonstration that high-profile Brooklyn residential projects can lead on biodiversity, native planting, and ecological intelligence rather than treat those as add-ons.
The project sits alongside Rewild Landscape's other Brooklyn and NYC residential work, and connects to the studio's larger portfolio of marquee public-realm projects (Channel Gardens at Rockefeller Center, NYC Midtown Urban Rewilding) and luxury commercial work (Cartier SoHo Terrace, The Surrey Hotel). Across all of these, founder Marie Salembier brings the same rewilding-first design discipline: layered plant communities, native species where possible, ongoing stewardship, and a refusal to treat ecological function as decorative.
