Top 5 Stories on Brownstoner This Week: Spike Lee's Former Office Sells, an Organized Closet

Norah Jones Offers Lavish Cobble Hill Greek Revival With Pool, Solar, Cedar Closet for $8 Million

Singer-songwriter Norah Jones purchased an extra-wide Greek Revival townhouse in the Cobble Hill Historic District a decade ago, lavishly customized it, and this week put it on the market for $8 million. The layout is essentially unchanged, but the mechanical and luxury additions are quite significant.

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Fort Greene Firehouse Previously Home to Spike Lee’s Office Sells for $4.7 Million

A firehouse that sits on a prominent corner in Fort Greene, used by Spike Lee as a production office until he moved elsewhere in the neighborhood in 2008, closed for $4.7 million Thursday.

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Gage & Tollner Team Prep to Revive One of Brooklyn’s Oldest Restaurants

It was serendipitous. Ben Schneider, Sohui Kim, and St. John Frizell, the teams behind Red Hook restaurant The Good Fork and bar Fort Defiance respectively, were hoping to open a small cocktail bar in Downtown Brooklyn. A broker was showing them some spaces, none of which fit what they wanted. At the end of their tour, after a series of disappointments, the broker said, “Oh, let me show you one more thing.”

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Brownstone Boys: How Our New Closet System Keeps Us Sane

Our brownstone has fairly typical dimensions of 19 feet wide by 40 feet deep. In our upper duplex we have a living/kitchen/dining floor and then a bedroom floor. We chose to build three good size bedrooms rather than have one that is only big enough for a desk or a single bed. The compromise we made is that we don’t have a walk-in closet in the master. Anyone familiar with Brooklyn or New York City area real estate could probably back us up when we say closets are a very touchy subject here, and sometime you just don’t have any.

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Renovated Fort Greene Brick Italianate With Seven Mantels, Exposed Brick, Beams Asks $4.35 Million

A four-story brick Italianate townhouse in Fort Greene has been gut renovated since it last sold in 2017, and is now back on the market asking significantly more. When it last appeared, 362 Clermont Avenue had seven mantels in a variety of styles — including a gold-veined black marble one with an arched firebox — a range of wood floors, an updated kitchen, and a landscaped and brick-paved garden. It wasn’t recently renovated but it looked to be otherwise in good condition.

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