On the Market: Cobble Hill Townhouse Perfect for Entertaining

Our clients came to us wanting to renovate their Cobble Hill home, altering the parlor and garden floors to better fit their frequent hosting of large family gatherings, often including meals they prepare.

The house is a classic example of a Brooklyn townhouse, built by a developer in the mid-19th century with all the charm characteristic of the time. We strove to preserve the charm, warmth, and proportions of the house as we reimagined the layout of its lower floors for the 21st century.

As our founder, Ben Baxt, notes, our focus on circulation, relationships and transportation from room to room and floor fosters a comfortable, natural, and easy spirt. Refinement of a number of the little things add up to a harmony – a calm that’s difficult to explain – but can be felt.

Previously, the existing kitchen was tucked into the rear corner of the parlor floor – not much wider than the hallway. Huge meals were difficult to prepare, and the size of the dining room was compromised. With a bedroom situated at the rear of the garden floor, their beautiful back yard garden was difficult to incorporate into the flow of daily life.

Keeping these frustrations in mind, the kitchen is every home’s center of gravity. It was important that the kitchen was spacious, well organized, and well connected to both the dining room and the rear yard. We opted to move the kitchen down to the garden floor. Two essential moves offset moving the kitchen away from the living/dining areas: first, we moved the staircase to the rear of the floor, leading directly from the parlor to the garden, and second, we included a dumbwaiter, connecting the cellar-level storage, garden-level kitchen, and parlor-level dining room.

This left the parlor floor free to be a spacious living room at the front and a full-width dining room at the rear. The full rear wall allowed a third French door, providing balance and proportion previously missing. The doors lead out onto an existing deck, connecting the dining space directly to the rear yard. We carefully crafted an elegant, open staircase to connect the kitchen with a corner of the dining room.

The new staircase opens directly into the kitchen, which is itself a grand, bright space thanks to large double doors that open directly into the lush garden. Cooking being central to the clients’ activities, they felt strongly that the cooktop should be in the island, rather than along the party wall. To accommodate this, we designed a massive eat-in island with a carefully designed exhaust system. The use of each shelf and cabinet was carefully mapped in addition to the carefully assigned kitchen storage. We flipped the cellar staircase to make it easily accessible from the kitchen. Movement between all five floors of the home feels easy and natural. Careful structural work and detailing was necessary to incorporate central A/C, exhaust systems, and the dumbwaiter. 

The renovation, completed in 2017 by Ben Baxt and Sohui Kim, is now on the market. The house was recently highlighted on 6sqft. Check out the listing here:

Cobble Hill Townhouse

Bathed in natural light and on a quiet street in prime Cobble Hill, this single family townhouse at 146 Baltic St. was built circa 1852 and renovated over the decades, most recently in 2017. Its graceful blend of original features and thoughtfully executed changes creates a gracious home that is both timeless and fresh, and notably warm and comfortable.

https://www.corcoran.com/listing/for-sale/146-baltic-street-brooklyn-ny-11201/23373849/regionId/1