House of the Day: 132 St. Marks Avenue

well the layout issues discussed here cuts to the heart of the problem of living in a brownstone.

if you put the kitchen downstairs, then, the room you spend a great deal of your time in is in a darker, lower level space. if you put the kitchen on the parlor level, then you have the forced cramped layout as you see above.

there is no way in brownstone to have a big kitchen, big dining area and big living area on the same floor - especially if you keep the wall and doors to the parlor as these folks did. maybe if you had a really wide building and took out all the walls??

when i lived in a brownstone, had the kitchen and TV/family room on the garden level, the living room and dining room on the parlor - then office and bedrooms upstairs. frankly, i hated it - spent all of my time in the lower level garden floor (it was dark, and can't really open your shades all the way or you are on display) and rarely used the parlor floor. also, had to run up and down 2 stories to my bedroom and my office.

i dunno, the layout difficulty of brownstones is a huge problem for me - one that large apts or lofts don't have. i now have 1000 sq ft of useable space per floor without the confining walls. one floor is divided into a fairly large and open kitchen with ajoining dining room that has room for a wall of built-ins and a table that can seat up to 10, down the hall there's a full bath ad then an office/guest room and finally, a large living room that leads to a deck and a private landscaped garden. also, have windows on 3 sides, so great light-another plus over browntones. (bedrooms on the 2nd level of our duplex). this big open, flowing layout is simply not possible in a brownstone.

Posted by: wine lover at October 16, 2008 2:07 PM