Real Estate

Neo-Classical Row House by Axel Hedman With Central Air, Brighter Look Asks $4.895 Million

A new dressing room, laundry room, and updated kitchens and baths meet woodwork, stained glass, parquet, mantels and a pier mirror in this landmarked Park Slope limestone.

by Stephen Zacks

12/03/2018 3 minute 0

We could write a whole special treatise on light vs. dark colors in the visual culture of brownstone Brooklyn based on this four-bedroom house in the Park Slope Historic District, part of a row designed by the prolific architect Axel Hedman. The townhouse at 602 6th Street was built circa 1909 in an eclectic neo-Classical style, its pale limestone facade inspired by the City Beautiful Movement of Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted’s 1893 World’s Columbia Exposition in Chicago.

But in contrast to the 20th century white interiors of Le Corbusier or Richard Meier, its curved bays and bracketed cornice, striped with columns and banded by carved floral panels, have nothing of the austerity of the modernist movement. The interior, however, is another story.

In 2017, the current owners bought it from the longtime owner for $3.65 million (here’s the pre-renovation listing), and the contemporary taste for all-white interiors prevailed in its renovation. Wood panels in the dining room got painted over with the bright white palette that dominates everywhere, from the formerly vintage now minimalist white kitchen cabinets to the off-white carpeting in the bedrooms and the hex mosaic tiles in at least one of the four bathrooms.

One exception is the media room, where the owners embraced the even more recent paint-everything-dark-gray trend. Also spared were the pier mirror in the parlor and the exposed beams, stained dark brown, in the English basement ground floor. Its front room is staged as a studio/office with white epoxy floor and a desk facing the street through bay windows.

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Apart from that they changed the light fixtures, opened skylights, replaced all but the stained glass windows, and upgraded the mechanicals, adding central air. There is also a new laundry room, dressing room and parlor-floor powder room.

Technically a two-family, the home has a flexible layout that can be used as a single-family or as a two-bedroom top-floor rental over an owner’s triplex.

Listed by Maria Ryan and Libby Ryan of Compass, the townhouse is asking $4.895 million. Is the price warranted?

[Listing: 602 6th Street | Broker: Compass] GMAP