Victorian Flatbush House Tour Recap

Arsenic & Old Lace

Thank you so very much for showing the real Victorian House Tour homes

Too bad you could not do the interiors

I went and enjoyed it. There are some really amazing houses on the tour, and it was fun talking to some of the owners about their renovations.

I went on the Boerum Hill house tour which included the home of the Lace Room antique dealers. It was incredible, three houses wide and two stories above the store on Atlantic. Incredible antiques, gardens, solarium, trompe l’ouel (or however you spell it). The kitchen had a full wall of windows with Frank LLoyd Wright style stained glass and arts and crafts cabinetry. I couldn’t believe I was in Boerum Hill! Amazing.

Fantastic weather for a semi fantastic tour. The weather couldn’t have been better and overall there were some impressive homes on the tour. It was my first time taking the tour, and with all the absolutely breath taking homes in the area, I was expecting a little more.

First off, some notes on the organization of the tour.
The signage for the tour was really lacking. There were no signs pointing you from the front of the church to the side lawn where you picked up/bought tickets or picked up you map if you had tickets. A helpful person that had gone wrong direction pointed us the right way.

The guide book and map only listed the street address of the building, and not the cross street. So you had to keep switching from map to listings to figure out where to head next. And the text in the descriptions seemed to lack the year the house was built.

A better layout of the guide would have been:
House address w/cross street
Name of owner(s)
Year house built
Year purchased by home owner
Text about house and owner

You had to keep reading through the text to try and decipher when the house was built (which was often not in text and I kept forgetting the date from the plaque on porch of some but not all houses) and how long the homeowner had owned house.

Also the orange signs in front of the buildings were too small and had text in such a small font size you had to be on top of the sign to see the text.

There was supposed to be an apartment on the tour, but according to the Real Estate lady, that was hawking her apartment open house, that stop had been dropped from the tour. Not sure why they didn’t post a sign that the apartment had been dropped from the tour (and lead us to wonder if the RE agent was just trying to reroute people to their open house).

There were shuttle busses, but it was amazingly unclear when the busses would be arriving, and where they would be heading next, so opted to walk the whole route.

I will have some pictures posted tonight. Only have photos of outside of houses and some of the back gardens. (no interior photos allowed). Several of the most impressive homes were ones where the owners had been doing their interior renovation first and had not yet done up the exterior.
A few of the bedrooms, in some houses, did suffer from that “Victorian” look of baby pink walls, flowered bordered wallpaper and lots of shabby chic furniture/decor. But overall, lots of great rooms.

The highlights of the tour were houses that had fabulous inlay work in the original wood floors, beautiful wood trim. A couple of houses had really cool back gardens and the final stop was a garden with a fountain, pool, a huge lawn with fruit trees and vegetable patch.

Fabulous. As the photos show, the flowers were amazing!