Real Estate

Clapboard, Brick and Brownstone: Four Open Houses to See This Weekend

Our open house picks for this weekend have distinctly different personalities. There’s a charming clapboard house in industrial Bushwick, a Bed Stuy diamond in the rough, a Boerum Hill townhouse crammed with seven units, and a renovation project in Park Slope whose listing offers only an exterior shot.

Brooklyn Open Houses -- Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Bed Stuy

by Chris Erikson

04/15/2016 4 minute 0

Our open house picks for this weekend have distinctly different personalities. There’s a charming clapboard house in industrial Bushwick, a Bed Stuy diamond in the rough, a Carroll Gardens townhouse crammed with seven units, and a renovation project in Park Slope whose listing offers only an exterior shot.

On Douglass Street in Carroll Gardens is a brick four-story with no fewer than seven apartments within. The top three floors each hold a pair of “junior one-bedrooms” — which have windowless “sleeping alcoves” — while the bottom level has a floor-through with garden access. There’s a bit of detail, including moldings and tin ceilings. Mechanicals are new. One complication: a rent-stabilized tenant on the third floor. Other tenants are on month-to-month leases or are due out in August.

In the center of Park Slope, on 1st Street off of 7th Avenue, we’ve got a four-story Queen Anne-style row house in need of an overhaul. It’s a legal two-family that’s been used as a single-family (with a second kitchen on the top floor). The sole picture is of the exterior, so exactly what awaits within is a mystery. The listing promises “wonderful bones” and “many historic details,” while cautioning that a full renovation is in order.

Our next home comes billed as having “rustic country charm,” which may be an odd thing to claim for a home in the midst of industrial Bushwick, but it does have some quaint appeal. This one dates to the 1860s, according to the listing, and is set up as a single-family with two bedrooms on the second floor and an open loft space on the third. It got a complete renovation in 2008, including new boiler, electric and plumbing and new kitchen and baths.

Last up, a yellow-brick tow house with a barrel front, on Lexington Avenue in Bed Stuy. A legal two-family being used as a one, it’s got numerous original details intact, including pocket doors, mantels, wainscoting and wood floors, but needs restoring and renovating.