WOW, 59 comments and counting on today’s Brownstoner post… granted, many of them are the same people back-and-forthing about how much the job cost (I’m hoping the architect will weigh in on that and put the matter to rest).

The project, by Neuhaus Design Architecture, interested me because it made use of virtually every bit of the existing Victorian woodwork on the parlor floor of this Park Slope brownstone, while still accommodating a functional modern kitchen.

And I love the tub, which was original to the house but which was moved into its own alcove to create a luxurious ‘bathing room.’

To take a look for yourself (and read those impassioned comments, which are a lot of fun for me in contrast to the quietude here at casaCARA), go right here.

I DON’T OFTEN PICK UP those glossy real estate brochures you see piles of on Main Street in East Hampton. They feature mostly multi-million dollar properties, not the sad fixer-uppers I’m interested in.

However, I did grab one the other day, and there on a back page were two side-by-side cottages in a low-key area of Amagansett that I just love: Lazy Point, where the sky is big, the vegetation is scrubby and piney, and the lapping waters of Napeague Bay are right there.

One of them appealed more than the other — the cedar-shingled one with a deck that reminds me fondly of Fire Island (asking 425K), below — and I called about it right away. Naturally it’s gone to contract.

The property next door (owned by the same family), top three photos, is still available at 450K. That one has no curb appeal whatsoever; it’s shingled with the rigid asbestos tiles that were so popular in the ’50s, and is just a box.

Still, I made the field trip yesterday, when 8″ of weekend snow had melted and been washed away by Monday’s rains. I had to see if regret was in order on cottage #1, and whether cottage #2 had possibilities. The answers are no and maybe.

I loved the drive out there, about 20 minutes from my home in Springs (and 20 minutes further from NYC), dipping through pine woods and meadows. I turned onto Mulford Lane, and drove along it toward the bay, looking for the addresses. As I got closer and closer to the water, I got excited… this is really good! Then I realized that too close to the water is not a good thing on Mulford Lane. The last two houses, below, once inhabitable, are now in the water and boarded up, and the beach at the end of the road is sand-bagged against further encroachment. These are maybe 8 or 10 houses in, which seems far enough to be safe from flooding, for my lifetime at least.

#1 (the cedar-shingled one) is smaller than it looks in the brochure — quite tiny, at 500 square feet — and I put that out of my head. #2 (the nondescript white one) is slightly larger, 700 square feet. It has nothing — nothing — to recommend it architecturally. It’s hard to see how it could be charmed up, though I daresay the editors of the late Domino magazine could do it. I didn’t see the interiors, but as the listing agent, JF Kuneth of DevlinMcNiff put it, “It’s very Grandma.” As such, it only garners about $11,000 a season in rental income — potentially $15-18,000 after those Domino editors get through with it.

No add-on building is possible, because it’s a flood zone. Not even a deck. There’s a cute old shed at the back, large enough for a guest bed.

And of course, at a 450K price point, which must seem completely nuts to those in the heartland (anywhere except perhaps California, that is), it’s top o’ the market. But then, the one next door was snapped up quickly, assuming the sale goes through.

I’m going to pass and continue my search. If you feel differently, go here for the listing, and give JR a call (631/324-6100 x 354, wkuneth@halstead.com).

To read about my discovery of Lazy Point two summers ago, and see lots of cute beach cottages, go here.

ONE OF THE FEW HOUSES designed by maverick architect Andrew Geller that is not in the dunes of Fire Island or the Hamptons is on the market. The 2,000-square-foot, 3BR, 2.5 bath house, built in 1960 and added on to — also by Geller — in 1982, sits on a wooded .87-acre lot in the North Fork, L.I. village of Mattituck.

Photos: Erin Schultz

It’s not one of Geller’s more outrageous designs, which happened earlier in his long career. The Brooklyn-born architect, at his best, came up with these extraordinary contributions to mid-century beach house architecture:

1955 Reese House, Sagaponack, L.I., left

1958 ‘Double Diamond’ (Perlroth) House, Westhampton Beach, below

To see more photos of the house, go here. To make an appointment to view it, or for further information, contact Nicholas Planamento, Town and Country Real Estate, 631-298-0600 x 103 or 631-948-0143,nplanamento@1townandcountry.com

You’ll find an appreciation of Geller by critic Alastair Gordon that appeared in the East Hampton Star right here.

And to learn still more, click here for an article by Geller’s grandson Jake Gorst, who is active in preserving his grandfather’s body of work.

VINTAGE FARMHOUSE, check. Catskill views, check. Barn, ample grounds, big pond. Check, check, check. Two hours from NYC — check that, too.

What more do you want for 289K? To be set far back from the road? Sorry, that’s the one thing you cannot have.

But this new-to-market 1905 farmhouse in Livingston, N.Y., on a 4.4 acre hunk of land with stunning mountain vistas, has an awful lot going for it. At 1,500 square feet with 3 bedrooms and 1.5 baths, and reasonable taxes under $4,000/year, it drives home the point yet again that New York’s Hudson Valley offers some of the best real estate values around. From a Hamptons perspective, it’s an outrageous steal.

Good food for fantasy, too. Look at the space below, in the attic of the barn, one of several outbuildings on the property. What kind of workshop, painting or pottery studio, writer’s retreat, guest quarters could you make out of that?

A few more tantalizing details from the listing: there are wood floors, plaster walls, and original fixtures, yet the house’s innards, including the furnace and septic system, are new.

That’s not all: there’s an original smokehouse, chicken shed, garage and 3-seat outhouse. All have original clapboard siding (as does the house), and are set among lilacs and pear trees.

And you won’t even have to think up a name for the place. It’s known as Watercress Hill, for the wild watercress that thrives (even in January) in the year-round stream a few feet from the back deck of the house and the spring-fed pond.

For lots more photos of the interior and property, go here. Worth a look, wouldn’t you say?

TODAY, ‘THE INSIDER,’ my weekly column on Brownstoner.com, features three projects by the Brooklyn-based design team Nastasi Vail, who’ve made a specialty of attractive, well-designed, reasonably priced built-ins particularly suited to the proportions and storage requirements of 19th century row houses.

I happen to love their work and don’t think I’ve ever seen such attractive built-ins in any Brooklyn brownstone (which is why I featured them).

Take a look here, and if you are so inclined, add a comment to the post, which has been dominated so far today by nay-sayers.

“LITTLE BLUE” is what Tina Fallon calls the sweet cottage on a quiet street in the North Fork, L.I.  village of Greenport. She recently finished renovating it and has just put it on the market (in order to buy another house around the corner). “Architecturally, it’s a mixed bag,” says Fallon, a Brooklyn-based real estate agent, “like a gingerbread house assembled by unruly toddlers.” Still, she was charmed by it, despite the fact that the bay window was peeling off the facade and wasn’t original to the house to begin with, nor were the arched windows that were another visual drawing card.

The house, of indeterminate age, was “a dump,” Fallon recalls. It may have been a kit house, and moved from another location. The ‘before’ photo, above, belies the herculean renovation she and her husband did on the place after buying it a few years ago. “There was all-weather carpet throughout, weird angled walls to hide plumbing pipes, a toilet that vented into the bathroom, a fireplace protruding halfway into a very small room. The cold air return vent was in the floor, right when you walked into the house. The roof needed work, the siding was coming off in places, there was a huge tree stump in the middle of the yard. And at 850 square feet, the house was tiny. But the ceiling height downstairs was good, the lot was oversized, there was a large shed with a skylight, and the mechanicals were fairly recent. My mother hated the shabby interior,” she continues. “My husband hadn’t even seen it. But I proceeded with a full price offer and bought the place.”

The renovation that followed was extensive. You’ll get a sense of that from the ‘during’ photos, below.

The result is nothing short of fantastic, as seen the ‘afters,’ below. Tina’s company is listing the house for 325K (which seems highly reasonable to me, knowing the North Fork market as I do). I’ll let Tina tell you the whole story and backstory of their purchase and reno in her own words at the bottom of this post. She took the trouble to write it all out, and it’s full of fascinating and useful info for those with an appetite for the minutiae of renovation.

ASKING $325,000

Please contact owner/agent Tina Fallon at greenportcottage@gmail.com.

Lot size: 50’x150’

Approx sf: 850

Taxes: $1749

Says Tina Fallon:

You wouldn’t know from the outside how much we changed. It’s still a little blue cottage, with a cute bay window and a single bath. But nearly everything is new. Eileen Wingate in the Greenport buildings department came up with a photo of the house from the 70’s showing the front windows to be simple one-over-ones with no bay – a later owner added these old arched multi-light windows and tacked the bay window onto the front. We could have replaced them all, but we tried to remind ourselves that we had fallen for this house for a reason, and it had nothing to do with historical correctness or architectural integrity. The house is adorable, and the windows are a big part of that. So we restored them. We removed the terrible storm windows, created a new support base for the bay, and redesigned the trim profile to unite the windows.

When we stripped off the old siding we found the long trim piece that separated the top section from the lower one. Even though the bay window’s roof interrupts it, we decided to keep it to break up the clapboard. No one knows how old the house is – it may have been built from a kit – but the consensus is it was moved to this lot from anther location. Initially I was thinking we would paint her gray for a more dignified look, but my mom really wanted to keep her blue.

My husband and I bought our first home together in Greenport before we were married. It was autumn 1999, and I had become convinced that if we didn’t buy at that moment we would miss our window of affordability. So I held up my parents for the money we were supposed to use for our wedding, and we put 10% down on an 1840’s house on Main Street. My husband got a book deal to pay for the wedding, which took place at the American Legion Hall in Greenport – a space more frequently used for roller skating and Molly Hatchet concerts. We spent every weekend in Greenport, filling the house with our friends and, eventually, two kids. We restored the front porch, renovated the rear addition, and got the flues lined and fireplace working again. After our second daughter was born it became too difficult for me to drive back and forth every weekend, and we sold the house and our condo in Greenpoint to finance a move to Rowayton, Connecticut. We lasted a year before moving straight back to Brooklyn. By then it was 2005, and we could no longer afford Greenport. Mayor Dave Kapell had transformed the village through the creation of Mitchell Park, a waterfront esplanade with vintage carousel, transient dockage and winter ice skating rink (as well as a camera obscura to keep it weird). Fancy restaurants lined Front Street. We had been priced out.

The 2008 crash hit the East End pretty hard. As homes became more affordable on the South Fork and Shelter Island, sales slowed in Greenport. My father’s family was selling the ancestral farm in the Finger Lakes region, and I knew my dad would need a little patch of grass to mow when he and my mom came to spend the summer with us. (Plus our place in Red Hook was a little small for six.) I kept an eye on new listings, but the houses were still out of reach. After we were outbid on a gorgeous 1880’s Victorian on First Street in 2009, I gave up on Greenport and started looking in Columbia County, despite the fact that my saltwater-loving husband swore he would never go there.

I was in London one night idly scanning the real estate sites when I found the listing for 427 Second Street. Remarkably, it was listed for only $24,000 more than we had paid for our first house in Greenport, over ten years prior. There was an accepted offer on the house, but I begged the listing agent to wait until I returned from London to see it, and that if it was structurally sound we would pay full asking price. I schlepped my parents and the kids out the day before we began our vacation. Not surprisingly, he house was a dump: all-weather carpet throughout, weird angled walls to hide plumbing pipes, a toilet that vented into the bathroom, a fireplace protruding halfway into a very small room. The cold air return vent was in the floor, right when you walked into the house. The roof needed work, the siding was coming off in places, there was a huge tree stump in the middle of the yard. And at 850 square feet, the house was tiny. But the ceiling height downstairs was good, the lot was oversized, there was a large shed with a skylight, and the mechanicals were fairly recent. My mother hated the shabby interior. My husband hadn’t even seen it. But I proceeded with the full price offer and we signed contracts via Fed Ex during our vacation.

After closing, we had a local contractor handle the demo – nearly everything was ripped out, including the fireplace, which we had to sacrifice in the interest of adding living space and opening up the kitchen to the dining room. All of the trim was salvaged and reused. We removed the ceiling upstairs and exposed the beams in the gambrel roof. The kitchen and bath fixtures were removed, the central brick chimney exposed, and layers of carpet and vinyl flooring peeled back. The floors downstairs were unusable, sadly, but the upstairs wood floor had been painted and was deemed okay for country bedrooms. Multiple dumpsters hauled away the trash, along with the giant stump and dead limbs from the overgrown trees.

For budgetary and I spent weeks drawing and redrawing the space. In such a small house, math determines design. The existing kitchen sink was one of the only charming interior features – a cast iron classic with a drainboard. It was 5’ long, dwarfing the 20” range and 24” fridge. Sadly, it had to go. The house seemed to have been built originally with no indoor plumbing, and the one bathroom, tucked under a shed dormer on the second floor, was another math problem. The plumbing was run through the living space below, and a diagonal sheetrock wall added to conceal it. A shower bumped into the bedroom, making that room even more awkward. There was a cute pedestal sink and a working toilet, which we reused. But the shower had to go.  To open the space, we figured we could put a tub in the dormer and shift the toilet and sink a bit without having to completely re-run the plumbing. But the space was so narrow that most commercial tubs, as well as clawfoot tubs, would not fit.  Most are 30” to 34” wide, and with allowances for drain and fixtures we could not accommodate them without moving an interior structural wall. Custom designing a tub was too costly, and the ceiling height did not allow for a standing shower.

Enter Craigslist. I found a listing for a Waterworks “Candide” pedestal tub – a long, narrow, “French boat” style that would fit, just barely, in our dormer. A contractor had bought all the fixtures for a controversial condo conversion of the old Claremont Riding Academy on the Upper West Side. When that development went bust, this tub came available – at a fraction of the original price. We dragged it up the steep slope of the partially excavated basement and it took four of us (the contractor, his assistant, and an architect who was buying faucets whom we dragooned into helping, poor man) to hoist it into the back of our ancient Expedition. I drove around with that thing in the back of the truck for a week before getting it out to Greenport. We had to reinforce the joists and add a new beam to support it, but the tub is a marvel. The contractor was selling the faucets, too, but not inexpensively enough for my budget. Plus they were a brushed nickel, which I find does not age well in salt air. I found the polished nickel Rohl faucet and handshower in Connecticut (again, Craigslist), which is beautiful and has a great heft to it.

Green building principles have been employed throughout the renovation, including low-maintenance Hardie-plank siding, reclaimed wood floors and low v.o.c. paints. Wherever possible, the original trim has been repurposed or reused. Spray foam insulation and ceiling fans keep the cool in summer and warm in winter. All new electric includes a combination of nautical fixtures and recessed lighting, as well as hard-wired fire and carbon monoxide sensors.

To create a new knee wall in the bedroom, we installed heavy mahogany paneling sourced from Craigslist. It came out of a Long Island mansion, and had been stored in a garage for years. Troy Poteet, genius carpenter, pieced it together on site. We painted it a gloss white. The reclaimed oak flooring came from upstate New York. We opted for a rustic floor as it masks dirt and offers a welcome contrast to all the white. Walls are Benjamin Moore China White, and trim is Super White.

The farm sink and 18” Bosch dishwasher, both “open box” items, came from Craigslist as well. The Con-serv fridge is just 24” wide and deep, but extra tall. The range and hood are from Ikea, as are the cabinets. Light fixtures are from Shiplights, and the pulley lamp over the dining table is from Pottery Barn. Porch light is from Barn Light Electric. The simple white ceiling fans are from Hampton Bay.

The new siding is James Hardie clapboard in Boothbay Blue – just as my mother wanted.

Here’s where you go for more information.

LIVING THE COUNTRY LIFE, and loving it. I came out to my East Hampton cottage shortly after New Years, with an open return ticket back to New York City. Twelve days later, I’m still here. In my cottage in the woods, I feel relaxed and contented. As long as there’s this thing called the Internet, I’m productive too. What seems to surprise people is that I’m never bored or lonely.

I mean, who wouldn’t love a place where the police blotter, as reported in the East Hampton Star, includes the following items:

• A man driving a Toyota pickup filled with debris drove over the scales at the recycling center on Springs Fireplace Road but didn’t pay for dumping.
• A man asked to remove his boat from a slip at the dock at Gann Road told police he had permission to keep his boat there and “would not be removing it any time soon.”
• A woman told police her vehicle was scratched on its driver’s side while parked at the Circle.
• Police confiscated a mountain bike left on the sidewalk outside the EH Fire Department.

And my favorite by far:

• A swan was spotted running loose on Main Street near Buell Lane. By the time police arrived, the swan was on the village green and out of the road.

I’ve easily kept busy puttering around the house; raking leaves off the lawn just to “get my blood moving,” as my friend Lula would say; perfecting my winter soup recipes; watching MSNBC obsessively; and, on one annoying occasion, driving to Sag Harbor for an advertised estate sale, only to find this:

I kept up my local gym routine, went to Gurney’s Inn in Montauk for a facial and got a glimpse of the ocean (still there), and did a little bit of browsing the shops in Amagansett. My favorite antique store there has to be Nellie’s. If I was spending $2,500 on art right now, I would buy the group of 1940s family portraits in oil, below.

I also made plans for a new kitchen counter to be installed, replacing, at long last, the Formica one that was here when I bought this cottage in 2009. After considering and rejecting all the other options, I’ve settled on a new countertop of 6″x6″ white, matte ceramic tiles. That job begins tomorrow, and since I’ll be without a functioning kitchen for a few days, I am heading back tomorrow to the rough-and-tumble urban world (oh, how I’ve missed the Flatbush Avenue bus).

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION. I’ve been mulling that old real estate trope lately and wondering if it is always true. If so, this vintage cottage does not have it going on.

It’s on Rt. 114 in East Hampton which, as the name suggests, is a pretty busy road. I’ve long had an aversion to property with a route-some number address, because they’re county roads with enough traffic to qualify for double yellow lines down the middle.

BUT, like so many things, location is subjective and often psychological. I’m thinking of our row house in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, which thirty years ago was on the fringe of a fringe neighborhood, and now is considered by one young tenant “such a great location!” Yes, the neighborhood has changed, but I for one still wouldn’t consider it a great location, much less one with an exclamation point.

BUT again, look at this place. You can tell just by the placement of the door and windows that it’s 200 years old, though it has been thoroughly remodeled and (invisibly from the front) expanded; it now has 3 bedrooms and 1-1/2 baths for a total of 1,600 square feet, and even a swimming pool. It’s set about 100 feet back from the road, with neighbors on that stretch of 114 that include a tree nursery and what must be East Hampton’s largest expanse of corn field.

Taxes are low ($3,156/year), and though the asking price is crazy ambitious, its charm factor is so high I couldn’t resist bringing it to your attention.

You’ll find more details and photos here.

ONE OF THE PERKS of writing for shelter magazines is getting inside a lot of interesting houses. For the holiday issue of Hamptons Cottages & Gardens magazine, I got a look at the interior of one of East Hampton’s venerable Main Street houses, built around the time of the Revolution.

Its longtime owners removed a later Victorian front porch (for which they were find $5,000 by the Town and considered it a fair deal), restored its wavy glass windows and wood-paneled walls, and furnished it largely with period-appropriate antiques.

You can find the whole article right here.

Photos: Tria Giovan

It’s just the way I like ‘em: quirky (only 12 feet wide), flooded with sunlight, serene and uncluttered in a Scandinavian sort of way, livable, comfortable, and down-to-earth.

It’s a full-on renovation by architect Tim Rasic for his own family.

Go here to eyeball the whole thing. And please don’t be shy about joining the discussion on Brownstoner.