For years Missy Robbins toiled away in the kitchens of notable fine dining restaurants like A Voce in New York and Spiaggia in Chicago. At Lilia, her first solo venture in Brooklyn, New York’s Williamsburg neighborhood, she embraces a homier approach, with guests experiencing “Italy through my eyes in a comfortable but elegant setting,” she says.

Although Robbins was deeply involved in the process, the transformation of a 70-year-old auto body repair shop into Lilia was a task that fell to Brooklyn- and Venice, California-based designer Matthew Maddy. Originally, he recalls, “it was pretty battered. It looked like a pigeon coop before we started. It was unheated, uninsulated, full of dissembled cars, defunct machinery, and a thick coat of engine oil.”

Maddy and his team brightened the garage space with a palette of gray and an abundance of wood, painstakingly working on all elements from millwork to ceiling finishes by hand. He also maximized the “incredible cathedral-like light” filling Lilia. Rather than reflect it, everything inside appears to absorb this lustrous sheen, conjuring an atmosphere that is “muted and undemonstrative,” he says. “We were striving to create the backbeat.”

One such restrained example is the continuous light fixture traveling along the wall, up and over the windows, across the banquettes, and over the doors. Fashioned from a thin, matte black line of 3/4-inch steel tubing, its aesthetic function, Maddy points out, is more valuable than its practical one: “Crossing the pale, plastered brick walls, we thought it would be as subtle as a single graphite pencil line on a fresh sheet of drawing paper.”

More striking is the “prominent but not overwhelming” 60-foot-long, bleached white oak partition that unites the front and back of house and doubles as shelving and storage. Dividing the kitchen and dining areas, it also maintains a dialogue between them. “One driving desire of Lilia was to keep the room as open as possible,” explains Maddy. “To have Missy in the thick of it.”