A decade ago, Emily Eerdmans and her husband, Andrew McKeon, were living in a rented Brooklyn Heights garden apartment with low ceilings. They both worked from home: His office was very small, with a door. Her office was the ivory damask sofa in the living room — a perch she described as the “ideal backdrop for my needlepoint pillow collection.”

Just before her 40th birthday, Ms. Eerdmans, a design historian, decided she needed her own space “to make money.”

She saw a New York Times real estate advertisement for a windowed basement office at 14 East 10th Street, an 1839 townhouse in Greenwich Village. For the next five years, she commuted to her gallery, Eerdmans Fine Art, from the apartment in Brooklyn. Customers ducked under the stoop to enter, the bathroom was freshly renovated and the landlady lived like a modernist on the patrician parlor floor right upstairs.

The landlady died and a year later, in the summer of 2020, Ms. Eerdmans began to envision a live-work duplex.

Fortunately, Mr. McKeon, too, could look past the many sloppy coats of paint and see the potential of the sublime neoclassical architecture. “Even in that glopity-glop state, you couldn’t miss the beauty,” he said. He agreed to give up their Brooklyn apartment to afford the extra rent on 10th Street.