House of the Day: 132 St. Marks Avenue
Someone went all out on the renovation at 132 St. Marks Avenue in Prospect Heights. The plaster and wood moldings have been restored to perfection and a large deck has been added off the parlor floor. The kitchen renovation doesn’t quite work for us aesthetically, but it certainly wasn’t a corner-cutting job. There are bound…
Someone went all out on the renovation at 132 St. Marks Avenue in Prospect Heights. The plaster and wood moldings have been restored to perfection and a large deck has been added off the parlor floor. The kitchen renovation doesn’t quite work for us aesthetically, but it certainly wasn’t a corner-cutting job. There are bound to be plenty of people who would love to own this house. The big question is whether they’ll be willing to pay $2,485,000 for the privilege.
132 St. Marks Avenue [Corcoran] GMAP P*Shark
Very nice. This place will be an interesting bellwether of the market. I’m hoping it’ll get 2.4. If not, I’ll seriously have to re-appraise my place, which I seriously do not want to do.
I have an open question about 1- versus multi-family dwellings. Are 1-family’s generally more valuable per square foot, all things being equal? I always figured that a multi-family would bring in more buyers and thus demand a higher price. What’s the conventional wisdom?
That’s a rather far fetched concern with respect to garden rentals in a 2 family, and in any event, I would imagine any change in law would have a phase in provision and/or a grandfather clause that would not serve to adjust existing leases.
Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here, and that is, if you’re going to restore a house with an eye toward a someday-big resale, you had better get it back to as original condition as possible. This house probably qualifies as “move-in condition,” or as near to it as most of us would deem possible, and yet there are still all sorts of complaints. I for one like the original design with the kitchen/dining room on the first, garden, level, and the two parlors as two parlors. And I don’t like the design of the bookcases here. I wonder if the owners renovated it entirely to their own taste (“this is the house I’ll die in”) or did they renovate to re-sell? Does anyone know?
Too, the longer I try and turn back the tide on more than 100 years of wear and tear and 50 years of minor architectural vandalism, the more I think that a house in truly move-in condition, one where I didn’t have to think about odd pieces of cast-iron, missing curved doorbells, and mismatched knobbery, let alone the history of linoleum and the history of electricity on display, the more I think a house in “move-in condition” would cost, uhmmm, $4 million.
I think there’s an awful lot of nitpicking going on here today regarding this house. We haven’t seen very many with architectural detail as grand as this. The kitchen is a very nice job and I think the whole thing is pretty top notch. All of the opinions about what should be on each floor are valid but they are all individual preferences.
I think you should all chill out and probably could use a drink or two. I know i do and I know where to get one in about 3 1/2 hours.
I think this place is beautiful, and I don’t think I’d want the kitchen on a different floor to the dining room, too much carrying of trays up and down stairs. Of course when the brownstone design was developed, most middle class families had a live in housekeeper and a maid to do all the fetching and carrying. I can think of lots of reasons why I wouldn’t want to rent out a garden level apartment – the risk of getting a horrible tenant, the loss of privacy, but most of all I don’t like the sounds that are coming from Albany. With the possibility/probability of a Democratic majority in both House and Senate, as well as a Democratic Governor, there are quite a few in the Democratic Party salivating at the thought of extending rent stabilization by raising the luxury threshold and extending the coverage to all rental units. Quite frankly, if I had a garden unit at the moment, I would not be renewing the tenant’s lease until that situation became crystal clear. I don’t think that single units in a two family house have ever been regulated and probably won’t ever be, but some rent stabilization advocates are quite extreme and would like to extend their reach everywhere. Just a thought.
I don’t love the bookcase work or the kitchen work or the recessed lighting in the bedroom. I’m with brownstoner here. Pretty house, but not in love.
This place is beautiful.
On the layout issue, we live in a brownstone, in the upper triplex over garden rental. It’s a wide place (22.5 feet wide) so our kitchen and dining room in the back parlor area is spacious and nice (more of a galley type kitchen with a large counter/peninsula separating it from the dining room. Plenty of seating for 12 at the dining table etc for big gatherings.
That said, if I had the luxury of a 1 family of the same sort of size as our place, and unlimited funds to renovate/restore, I’d make the kichen on the ground floor where the original one was, in the back, with the formal dining room in the from. I would open up the back wall at the garden level so the kitchen would have a wall of windows and glass doors to the garden. That way you could have a nice, large, bright eat in kitchen, and up front a beautiful formal dining room with fireplace.
I personally don’t care about having my living space (e.g. where I watch movies on TV and generally lie around) on the same level as where I prepare and eat meals. I’d put that on the parlor floor, probably in the back parlor as a library/den, with the front parlor as formal living and music/piano room.
But, poor me, I only have three floors to live on so we can’t do this (sarcasm intended).
I hear you ditto. I do think even if I was spectacularly wealthy I might rent out the garden. Not being spectacularly wealthy though this is a pointless argument….But your point is ultimately correct, whoever can afford a house this expensive is not going to be putting 15% down and trying to make the mortgage through rental income. Anyone rich enough to buy this house at this price is going to buy it outright.
Wasder, I understand your position, but when you say “unless you really don’t need the money” – that need is what I am refering to as necessity.