Color Quandary

OK, IT’S NOT A LIFE-ALTERING DECISION, but I’m surprisingly perplexed about what to do re the paint color for my bedroom walls. Me, the expert who successfully chose colors sight unseen for the living room and bathroom, below, when my landlords offered to paint any color I wanted before I moved into my new pied-a-terre, a brownstone garden floor-through in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, last month (that’s right, it’s not an apartment, it’s a pied-a-terre, and I’m gonna keep saying it.)

Benjamin Moore’s Dalila in the living room, above, and Ben Moore’s Tropicana Cabana in the bathroom, below

For the bedroom, I had been thinking red/orange, and I’ve now spent about $100 trying 9 samples from 4 different paint companies:

• Benjamin Moore. I started out with 3 wimpy pale pinks that are definitely not me; moved on to Coral Gables, more assertive but still too pink; then tried Poppy, an overly aggressive red I couldn’t possibly live with on a daily basis.
• Ralph Lauren. Hot Orange, way too dark; Mesa Sunrise, a maybe.
• Farrow & Ball. Orangery, which is more like yellow ochre. No.
• Pratt & Lambert. Pale Carnelian — love it for a chair, not a room.

All this has required several trips to Pintchick, one to deepest Brooklyn (Eastern Paint on Flatbush Avenue is the only Brooklyn store that carries the full line of Ralph Lauren paints), 2 trips into Manhattan (one to Saifee in the East Village which also carries RL, and another to London Paints in Chelsea for the Farrow & Ball).

See what I’m up against in the bedroom, below?

I’ve looked at my sample patches in every kind of natural light from dim to dark (it’s a north-facing bedroom under a deck, above), as well as artificial. Not one of my samples is calling out to me as the right color.

These are among the considerations:

• I want something to brighten the room and make it less dreary
• The paint mustn’t be too dark. Not only is the room already dark, it’s unfair to my landlords (as a landlord myself, I’m always pissed when I give people permission to paint whatever color they choose, and they choose deep purple)
• It has to work with the sunflower yellow living room, as the door between the rooms is almost always open
• It has to make me happy, lift my spirits, and envelop me with a sense of well-being, constantly

Tall order for a can of paint? Well, yes…hence the quandary.

My friend Debre thinks I should just keep going in this vein, use up all my samples for a kind of crazy quilt effect. No, my dear, I’m not doing that. Meanwhile, time’s a-fleeting. I’m already in the second month of a one-year lease (though I hope to stay much longer).

I’ve got to choose something, and soon. Maybe a nice blue or green?

Cottage Furniture in a Brooklyn Souk

IN MY QUEST for a storage solution for the boxes of files and photos presently stacked in the bedroom of my new Brooklyn apartment, I found FIND, a sprawling home-furnishings warehouse hiding in plain sight across from the Lowe’s parking lot in Gowanus. (They’ve been open since ’09, but I was out of town for a year-and-a-half, so it’s new to me.)

The place has an eclectic, even schizophrenic quality, stuffed as it is with wares from every corner of the world. The bulk of it is similar to what you might find at Bloomingdale’s: traditional overstuffed sofas upholstered in beige linen, farmhouse tables, wood armoires. That’s not the part that interested me.

I was drawn to a narrow strip of stuff they’re phasing out, apparently, leftovers from a big sale they had a couple of weekends ago: vintage glass-door cabinets with multi-tone paint jobs, surrounded by brass lamps, poufs, and mirrors straight out of a Moroccan bazaar.

The cabinets look like they’ve been artfully distressed (perhaps even naturally distressed in some cases) and have a cottage-y look, very like rustic American painted furniture of the 1930s and earlier. Except they’re made of teak, mostly, and were imported, I’m told, from India.

Some of them have fanciful moldings. One of the more massive cabinets — 42″ wide and 2 feet deep — is on chunky wooden wheels, inset into the frame.

The smaller pieces — medicine-chest size — are priced around $150; humongous ones range from $400 to $900, with local delivery thrown in. Alas, nothing I saw was quite right, functionally. I have a 6-1/2-foot-wide alcove I hope to fill with one large storage piece, and the cabinets I liked at FIND tend to the tall and narrow. Or else they had glass panes, and the idea is to have hidden storage.

Still, when this bargain-hunting veteran of the interior design/home furnishings scene sees something as unusual as these Indian imports, she takes notice.

FIND is at 59 9th Street, Brooklyn 11215; 718/369-2705.

Lefferts 2-Family Townhouse 599K

MY DAILY WALKS often take me past the Fillmore real estate office on Atlantic Avenue and Hoyt Street in Boerum Hill, and I invariably get caught up in looking at the house-for-sale listings pasted in the windows. Maybe because it’s coming up on two years since I bought my last property, and it’s time to start the search for the next one? (That is, if my “Buy a building every year as long as interest rates are low — OK, every other year” plan is still in force.)

Of the window flyers, I’m most drawn to this house on Sterling Street between Bedford and Rodgers in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, a couple of blocks from Prospect Park. It’s a little outside the official boundaries of Lefferts Manor, a 600-lot area established in 1893 with land-use restrictions that have kept the blocks looking just as they did in the late 19th century, but parts of Sterling Street are landmarked, and the 360-degree view of the street on the broker’s website looks uniformly lovely.

The language in the listing sounds urgent: “Estate Sale” “Must liquidate” “Priced for quick sale” (by the way, the window flyer has it at 599K, not the 649K on the website).

So, then: a 450K mortgage (assuming the house can be gotten for 550K, maybe less, and you’ve socked away 100K for a down payment, which I know you have) at 5% for 30 years is $3,040/month. Taxes are next to nothing ($1,021/year). Insurance and gas for heat add about $300/month, for a total nut of $3,500/month. Surely it’s possible to get at least that from a 5-room top floor rental and a parlor/garden duplex.

Click here for the listings page of Sal Cappi, Fillmore’s top broker. Look how many deals he has in contract, from Bed-Stuy to Boerum Hill. It’s a busy time, by all appearances. Don’t miss out on this time of opportunity, a little voice calls to me. What about you? Do you hear little voices, too?

Concrete Survivor in Gowanus

THE CORNERSTONE of the future, much-anticipated Whole Foods in Gowanus will be this odd remnant of New York City’s industrial past.

The Coignet Stone Company Building, one of the nation’s first concrete structures, has always been a puzzlement, standing by itself on the corner of Third Avenue and Third Street as if waiting for something to happen around it.

It stands because it was landmarked in 2006 by The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission as a pioneering example of concrete construction in the United States. The 2 ½-story, Italianate-style structure, designed by William Field and Son, was built between 1872 and 1873 to house the concrete manufacturer’s main office.

The building originally was part of the New York and Long Island Coignet Stone Company, a five-acre factory complex near the Gowanus Canal that manufactured artificial stone, a type of concrete invented by Francois Coignet in Paris in the 1850s. The factory supplied the arches and clerestory windows in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, the ornamental details for the Cleft Ridge Span in Prospect Park, and the building materials for the first stages of construction at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History.

Photo: Tom Rupolo/Urban Landscape ->

It may look like brick and limestone, but it’s made entirely of concrete. The 25-by-40 foot rectangular structure was built to showcase the durability and versatility of Coignet’s inventive product. The company was reorganized and renamed the New York Stone Contracting Company in the mid-1870s, and continued to manufacture Coignet stone until 1882. Shortly after, the building housed the office of the Brooklyn Improvement Company, which was instrumental in Brooklyn’s residential and commercial development during the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Coignet building is not owned by Whole Foods (which will include a 20,000 square-foot greenhouse on the roof), but it will be incorporated into the supermarket’s design and given a new roof and exterior repairs.

Photo: Nathan Kensinger via Brownstoner

Down it Goes: East Hampton’s ‘Pink House’

Photo: Curbed Hamptons

THE LATEST TRAVESTY in East Hampton real-estate was the demolition last month of the so-called “Pink House,” a Mediterranean-style stucco charmer built in 1903 that was once home to Gerald and Sara Murphy, the Jazz Age swingers who were F. Scott Fitzgerald’s models for Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night. Mary de Liagre, a former Ziegfield Follies dancer who died in June 2009 at age 94, had owned the house since the 1970s. It was a local landmark, not least for its pink paint job (more vivid in person than in the pictures I’ve been able to find).

Photo: East Hampton Star

Tucked in a corner south of the highway, a neighbor pointed it out to me last year and I’m glad I saw it before it was razed. The property’s new owner, an investment banker named Peter J. Solomon, bought it last July for $19 million — it had been listed originally at $22.5. I suppose for that price he should be able to do what he wants, but what rankles is that he pretends he loved the 107-year-old house and took it down regretfully because it was in bad shape (and with the unanimous permission of the East Hampton Village Zoning Board, which said the existing house did not “comply with Federal Emergency Management Agency regulations and does not meet village requirements for wetland or front-yard setbacks”).

Solomon claims he’s going to re-build “the same house — the only difference is we added a first-floor bedroom.” The original house had a footprint of 2,500 feet and a total square footage (with the second floor) of 4,290; the new one will have a footprint of 5,165, with total square footage of 7,450, though it’s hard to believe it will end up being quite that small, and impossible to believe it will look at all the same.

Photo: East Hampton Star

Wrote one passionate commenter to The East Hampton Star:

Boy, does this suck. That house was part of the core scenery of the town. You KNOW they were using the setbacks as a giant whitewash and excuse for just knocking it down to build something with built-in air-conditioning and room for 5 big-screen TVs and a collection of German-engineered cars. I’m so sick of people tearing down nice old houses for no good reason. I am SO SURE that the new house will be “in the same style.” Not. Most likely it will be yet another “neo-traditional” eyesore. Can’t there be a law against plain old sucky taste????

So hard not to pre-judge when you look around and see some of the monstrosities that pass for architecture around here.