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THE BEDROOM IN MY PROSPECT HEIGHTS PIED-A-TERRE is finally coming together. Last week I committed myself to a 1960s platform credenza, above, for storing my family’s photo archive, a more attractive repository than the half-dozen plastic bins in which our photos and personal memorabilia had been sitting (see below – yikes).
After much shopping around, I bought the credenza at Re-Pop near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. My penultimate stop was Baxter & Liebchen in DUMBO, a warehouse specializing in designer-name Scandinavian modern, mostly teak. Gorgeous stuff, but I didn’t want to spend four figures. So I ended up back at Re-Pop, where I chose a 78″ long piece by the American furniture company Kroehler, with a geometric raised pattern on the front, paying just under $500. It was delivered last Friday (in a snowstorm, naturally).
But then came the placement question. My bedroom — the back room of the garden floor of a brownstone — is huge, about 300 square feet, but oddly shaped, with several nooks and niches. I had originally intended the credenza to go in the niche next to the closet, where it would fit snugly. But the queen size bed had been tucked in there, above, and in order to put the [extremely heavy] credenza in that niche, where I knew it would look good, I would have to move the bed to the only possible other wall, since the others are either not long enough or have doors on them (one to the living room, one to the garden).
In the meantime, I had the movers put the credenza temporarily along that other wall, above, where it looked lost in space.
The main problem — and I’m not kidding about this — is that there’s a massive ceiling beam running across the room — a wide, heavy I-beam, above — that would bisect the bed, lengthwise, along that only possible other wall. Ceiling beams above the bed, according to my internet research, are nothing less than a feng shui nightmare. “Beams carry a tremendous load,” says one much-reproduced tract, “and this pressure is focused into the beams generating chi which continues downwards, placing direct pressure on you while you sleep.” This can be debilitating and cause physical problems, says Denise Lynn in Sacred Space: Clearing and Enhancing the Energy of Your Home, one of the feng shui reference books I plucked off my shelf. Terrifying, isn’t it?
What to do, what to do? Fortunately, there are some recommended ‘cures’:
- paint the beams (the beam is already painted, whew)
- drape fabric over the beams (I’m not going for a harem look, really)
- hang bamboo flutes 2-3 inches below the beam at a 45-degree angle,with the mouthpiece downwards, to “soften the load”
I went on to read more feng shui advice for the bedroom:
- place your bed in “the king’s position”where you can see the doorway (I can see one of the two)
- don’t place your headboard on the same wall as the incoming door to your bedroom (same wall, different plane, because the wall jogs – don’t know if that’s a mitigating factor)
- make sure when you lay in bed that you can see the incoming flow of energy when someone enters your bedroom (no one is entering my bedroom unless I know about it) — otherwise, you will miss new opportunities in your career or that great partner that you wanted to meet, because you don’t “see” the energy at night coming to you (guess I’ll have to take my chances) and you won’t be in control of your life (who is?)
- if you can’t change your bed to another wall, place a small mirror opposite the door so that when you open your eyes you can see the doorway in the mirror (that I can and will do, pronto)
A Brooklyn brownstone doesn’t lend itself naturally to feng shui principles, I’ve decided. Yesterday I took it upon myself, with the help of plastic coasters as sliders, a couple of bathmats, and sheer determination, to move the credenza into the desired niche, and the bed to the wall under the ceiling beam, above, where I slept very well last night, thank you.
Still, anyone know where I can get some bamboo flutes?
Cobble Hill Park, Brooklyn
WHAT IS IT ABOUT A MEWS that I (and others) find so irresistible? Nineteenth century brick carriage houses are neither as elegant nor as large as your classic high-stoop brownstones, but in neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill, they can cost just as much.
I guess you can’t put a price tag on that sense of being hidden away in a place time forgot, where people never stop exclaiming — even after years of residence — how remarkably quiet it is, how hard it is to believe you’re right in the middle of the city.
Verandah Place, looking west
The dictionary definition of a mews is “a street lined by buildings originally used as stables but now often converted into dwellings.” It’s a chiefly British usage, apparently. In this country, use the word ‘mews’ and you’re likely to hear, “Oh, you mean that little alley with the cute brick houses?”
I should know about living in a mews. For twenty years, from the mid-’80s until a few years ago, my family lived on Verandah Place in Cobble Hill, in a house we still own. There are other carriage houses in the neighborhood, but it’s the only mews (Brooklyn Heights has three that I can think of: Love Lane, Hunts Lane, and Grace Court Alley). I remember the original ad that brought us to the “coveted mews block,” and how I knew instantly that yes, I would be happy there. It was an ideal place to raise kids, on a traffic-free lane perfect for skateboarding and ball-playing.
Only a few of the houses were actually stables or carriage houses, with doors wide enough for carriages to enter. 
A couple still have intact pulleys, used for raising bales into the hayloft. The rest were small working-class dwellings. Ours is one of five built in the 1850s for (legend has it) the daughters of a homeowner on neighboring Warren Street.
There wasn’t always a park across the way. Until the 1950s, there was a church, and Verandah Place was gated. (I’d love to know where the name came from and whether some of the houses had verandahs. I’ve never seen them in a mews, but cast-iron balconies were not unheard-of in the area). The church was torn down, and a supermarket set to go up in its place. The community objected, and Cobble Hill Park was created in the 1960s.
I was reminded of the international appeal of the mews when I saw the one in central London, below, in last month’s New York Times real estate section. The pink house, once a stable, has 2BR and 2 baths and is on the market for the equivalent of $2.4million, more or less what the Cobble Hill mews houses would go for today. Click here to read all about it and see a slide show of the interior.
Photo: Gothamist
SNOWSTORMS HAVEN’T BEEN KIND to Admiral’s Row, a group of early 19th century naval officers’ residences adjacent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The once-distinguished strip of brick Greek Revival-style houses has been allowed to deteriorate shockingly. The buildings have crumbled, been repeatedly vandalized, and are now on the verge of demolition by the city, which has plans to partially raze the site and build a 65,000-square-foot ShopRite supermarket, plus 155,000 square feet of new commercial and industrial space.
The 1830s Timber Shed, a warehouse for ships’ mastheads, is one of two Admiral’s Row buildings that stands a chance of being saved
According to a recent report on the terrific website Brooklyn Based (which everyone who wants to keep up with developments in New York City’s hippest borough should subscribe to), “the forward march of development may be halted by the combination of one rickety roof and a winter’s worth of heavy snows.”
Building “B” of Admiral’s Row as it looked in its pre-Civil War heyday
To read more about this seeming paradox and one activist’s efforts to save Admiral’s Row, go here. Click here to take a video tour of the site as it looks today.
Then there’s my own impassioned blog post about Admiral’s Row, written in April 2009.
SHELTER ISLAND IS AN IDYLLIC PLACE, tucked between the North and South Forks of Long Island and accessible only by ferry. In its northwest corner is an almost perfectly preserved community of 1870s cottages with steeply pitched roofs and distinctive wood trim, along with more elaborate houses of the 1880s.
That corner of the island is Shelter Island Heights, with a total of 141 vintage houses on roughly 300 acres. About 100 of them were built by the Methodist Episcopal Church which, for eight short years in the 1870s, used the area for religious camp meetings. Frederick Law Olmstead had a hand in laying out the park-like open spaces, curving roads, and groves of trees.
The first wave of construction consisted of about 70 cottages with steeply pitched gable roofs and elaborate wood trim, similar to those found at camp meeting sites like Oak Bluffs in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., and Ocean Grove, N.J.,
Two such houses, top, in Shelter Island Heights — next door neighbors, in fact — are now on the market. Both are circa 1879, with water views, as well as occasional views of cars lined up to board the North Ferry for Greenport.
5 Clinton Avenue, for 495K, above, is an unheated 4BR, 1.5 bath cottage with a wraparound front porch and open second floor balcony. Go here for more info and pics.
2 Waverly Place, asking 595K, below, is similar, but with 3 BR, electric heat, and a large side yard. There more info here.
Both are convenient to charming and low-key shops and restaurants, as well as tennis, beach, ferry, and marina.
Please note: I am not a real estate broker, nor do I have any financial interest in the sale of any property mentioned on this blog. I just like spreading the word about unique, historic properties and what I believe are solid investment opportunities.
APOLOGIES FOR THE LACK OF NEW YEARS FIREWORKS here at casaCARA. Know that I wish you all good things (and nothing but) in 2011, but I have a hard time working up genuine enthusiasm for the changeover of the Roman calendar from December to January. New Years Eve has always felt arbitrary to me. The real new year is in spring, as far as I’m concerned, at the start of the gardening season, when all is green and fresh, and the constellations begin another turn around the heavens. My birthday is in early April, so that clinches it for me.
September is another pretty good New Years candidate, when the world again feels reborn. However long it’s been since school days, there’s still a residual rush of excitement and hope like the one that always accompanied the start of each new term. And the Jewish New Year in autumn, with its ritual chest-beating and long period of self-evaluation, carries much more spiritual weight for me than the secular resolutions (lose 10 pounds again) I tend to make in January.
I find January a distant, anticlimactic third as far as New Years go. It feels manufactured. Nothing really changes, except things having to do with tax preparation. January 1 brings to an end one year of record-keeping and ushers in another. Whoopee.
That curmudgeonly said, in the past I’ve always made some effort to celebrate, to do something, go somewhere. Last night, New Years Eve 2011, was the quietest I’ve ever spent. On the heels of a medical scare (a bad reaction to a drug intended to bring my blood pressure down — instead it went up), I was alone in my Brooklyn apartment, lying on the sofa with Keith Richards’ new autobiography, listening to jazz radio, a cup of tea by my side.
Celebratory it wasn’t, but I was suffused with well-being and gratitude, feeling lucky I didn’t have a stroke, and that I didn’t have any elaborate New Years Eve plans to cancel. I talked to one child, texted with another, got emails from a few old friends. I basked in the yellow-painted glow of my new apartment, above, surrounded by things that spent 18 months in storage and that I’m very happy to see again.
Still, in an effort to get with the New Year program, let me share something I re-discovered in the course of my recent move: a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, now stuck to my refrigerator door (change “day” to “year” if you wish):
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. Begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.”
If that isn’t wise counsel for the coming year, I don’t know what is.
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