Condo/Co-op of the Day

Grandly Scaled One-Bedroom With Loft in Brooklyn Heights Brownstone Asks $850K

The parlor floor co-op has high ceilings, a carved marble mantel, bay window and oversize doors, but recent updates are not making the most of its considerable charms.

by Stephen Zacks

01/15/2019 3 minute 0

This one-bedroom, one-bath co-op in a grand Anglo-Italianate brownstone has considerable charms but the current renovation is not making the most of them.

Occupying the rear two rooms of a monumentally scaled parlor floor at 134 Remsen Street in the Brooklyn Heights Historic District, it has 13-foot-high ceilings, a tall bay window, giant doorways with ear moldings and oversize original doors with octagonal details. A marble fireplace mantel — presumably decorative — is ornately carved with the same acanthus-leaf motif that dominates the building’s brownstone facade.

An awkward loft and stair in the bedroom, used here as a sort of accessory living room, and an ill-fitting kitchen inserted into the main room create clashing proportions, giving the home a dollhouse or Alice in Wonderland quality. The unit measures around 700 square feet, we estimate, based on the dimensions given in the floor plan.

The bathroom is not pictured, and the shiny new floors could use a rethink. There is plenty of space to turn part of the bedroom into a walk-in closet, and it might improve the proportions of the long room.

Built between 1861 and 1879, the brownstone is unusually wide at 31 feet. It had 10 units but now has eight, according to Department of Buildings filings that show four have been recently recombined into two.

(Incidentally, you can glimpse some earlier moments in the block’s history in a 1922 photo that shows a statue of Alexander Hamilton a few doors down and a 1925 photo of the opposite side of the street.)

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It might be worth exploring a clever renovation of this unit to maximize the space or even combining it with the twin unit for sale in the front of the parlor floor. The maintenance is already high at $1,155, however.

Both units, listed by Nicola Nicoletta and Michael Gidaly of Douglas Elliman, are having an open house tonight, January 15, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m.

The one-bedroom is priced at $850,000. The most recent sale in building was 4B for $500,000 in 2016. Think they’ll get ask?

[Listing: 134 Remsen Street, 2B | Broker: Elliman] GMAP