When the restaurateur John Seymour moved 12 years ago from Manhattan to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he was drawn by the raw lofts with low rents. 'The first place I lived was on Kent Avenue, with a revolving door of roommates and 20-foot ceilings,' he said. 'We could throw a football inside.'
He appreciated the neighborhood's laid-back vibe. 'I felt some kind of relief. I could breathe a little easier than in the city, where I grew up,' said Mr. Seymour, 36. The son of a nurse and a bartender, he was raised on First Avenue and 79th Street. 'Some people call that the Upper East Side,' he said. 'But if you are middle-class like me, you call it Yorkville. It was a German-Irish neighborhood, but it's become gentrified.'
Sitting in the living room of the two-bedroom loft-style apartment on Driggs Avenue where he has lived for the past four years with his wife, Fallon, 31, a former model who is from Trinidad and Tobago, Mr. Seymour muses about being a native New Yorker. 'We're a dying breed,' he said. 'When I was growing up, everyone in New York seemed like they were from New York. Even Williamsburg has gotten so global. The new New York is definitely different.'
On the wall over his desk in the living room, Mr. Seymour has two framed black-and-white photographs that he cherishes because they symbolize his 1980s childhood. One is a photograph of the graffiti artist Keith Haring; the other is of Andy Warhol with the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. They were taken by Ricky Powell, a downtown photographer who was a leading chronicler of hip-hop culture.
'They used to call him the fourth member of the Beastie Boys,' Mr. Seymour said.
Mr. Haring is one of his favorite artists. 'One day, I'll have the real deal.'
Mr. Seymour is unabashedly sentimental. When he broke into the restaurant business six years ago by opening a burger joint on North Eighth Street in Williamsburg, he called it Pop's to honor his father, who died when he was 19.
'He taught me everything I know about customer service, about building relationships and treating customers as if they're your friends,' said Mr. Seymour, who has his father's face tattooed on his forearm. The creation of the shadowed black-and-gray image was chronicled on the TLC series 'NY Ink.'
Mr. Seymour and his wife met at the Manhattan nightspot Snitch, where he was a bartender and she was a cocktail waitress. They moved to their current apartment because it was around the corner from Pop's, allowing them to keep a close eye on the business. They wanted enough space in case they started a family, although they weren't sure Williamsburg was a child-friendly area when their fraternal twin daughters were born three and a half years ago.
'But the neighborhood has exploded with children in the past two years,' Mr. Seymour said. 'There are a lot of alternative families with parents who don't have traditional jobs.'
Mr. Seymour is determined to be a doting, involved father despite the demanding hours of the restaurant business. He purposely opened his second restaurant - a casual place he co-owns called Sweet Chick, whose signature dish is waffles with fried chicken - one block from the apartment so he could tuck the girls into bed at night.
'I think my favorite thing about the apartment is the twins' room,' Mr. Seymour said. 'We went super-girly with it.'
Reminiscent of a page from the Pottery Barn Kids catalog, the walls are painted lilac and festooned with butterflies. His daughters' names, Jette and Milann, are spelled out in three-dimensional letters over their respective convertible cribs.
Like their father, who has slicked-back barbered hair and a plethora of tattoos, the girls project Williamsburg style and swagger. When they arrived home from preschool on a recent afternoon, they were dressed in colorful dresses and black Dr. Martens boots. 'I have a pair of them, too,' Mr. Seymour said.
As his wife got their snacks, Mr. Seymour turned the stereo to Pandora's Disney channel. 'Watch this,' he said, as the twins began to sing along to 'Let It Go' from 'Frozen,' dancing and gesturing as if they were auditioning for a toddler version of 'American Idol.' Mr. Seymour sang along, too. 'I know the whole soundtrack,' he said sheepishly.
Although there is plenty of space in the twins' room for their 19-month-old sister, Berry (who is named after a Williamsburg street), Mr. Seymour explained that 'she sleeps in a crib in our room - New York-style.'
That the bedroom is large enough for a luxurious California king-size mattress makes Mr. Seymour very happy. 'It fit perfectly in front of the window, and when we look out we can see Sweet Chick,' he said. 'I love that this building was a button factory and still has some of its original character, with the exposed brick walls and freight elevator.'
He beams with pride at the rack he designed and built to store his hat collection and hang his jeans. 'I'm good with my hands,' said Mr. Seymour, who worked as an electrician when he was in his early 20s. 'I do all of the build-outs on my restaurants.'
Last week, Mr. Seymour was putting the finishing touches on a Manhattan branch of Sweet Chick. 'It's a big deal because we took over the old Max Fish space,' he said, referring to the artists' dive bar that was a fixture on Ludlow Street from 1989 to 2013, when it was forced out by a rent increase. 'I was apprehensive. I worried about a backlash, but I thought, who better than someone like me who is from New York and is committed to making his future in New York? It could have been turned into a Chipotle or a Starbucks.'
He notes that the Lower East Side is just over the Williamsburg Bridge, so he will be able to get home quickly to see his daughters. 'They are the entire reason I'm working so hard in the first place,' he said. 'You have to have money to live out here now. It's gone from artists to quote-unquote hipsters to what I'd call the new yuppies.'
Mr. Seymour doesn't quite fit into any of those categories, but he is determined to raise his daughters in Williamsburg and give them a memorable urban childhood. 'I love that they will be real New Yorkers,' he said. 'But who knows what that will mean by the time they're grown up?'
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