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A large Colonial Revival with porch
Single-family house with eight bedrooms near Prospect Park asking $2.868M
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BY STEPHEN ZACKS
This single-family Colonial Revival
house is a little bit — or a lot — of the
suburbs stuck right in Ditmas Park,
with its siding, two-car garage, lawn,
front porch and basketball net in the
driveway. The home at 1221 Albemarle
Rd. has no fewer than eight bedrooms
— we can’t even imagine what you
need eight bedrooms for in a singlefamily
house in Brooklyn, but that’s
none of our business.
One of them is tiny and identifi ed in
fl oor plans as an offi ce. All we can say
is this place is sprawling, and despite a
tidy renovation, at least one of the bedrooms,
the one with a terrace on the attic
level, seems to have linoleum fl oors.
The house has two fi replaces, columned
and bracketed in the Colonial
Revival manner and apparently woodburning,
facing each other from the far
end of two book-matched living rooms.
There are parquet fl oors with inlaid
borders, and a bevy of stained glass windows
in the stairwell, which appears to
have walls with a popcorn fi nish. In the
dining room, a giant fi replace has been
made over into a dish cupboard.
The kitchen boasts an enormous
commercial range, which makes sense
if the house is really as full as it asks
to be, but the room doesn’t have nearly
enough food storage. There are, however,
three, count them, three big living
rooms, helpful for a house with potentially
six or seven (or more) kids.
We speculate the kitchen was carved
out of various pantries and mudrooms,
having originally been located in what
is now the dining room, with a butler’s
pantry leading to a dining room in
what is now one of the bay-windowed
living rooms. Either way, it would be
easy enough to restore the original confi
guration or keep it as is.
Located in the Prospect Park Historic
District, 1221 Albemarle Rd. refl
ected Frederick Law Olmsted’s ambition
for the design of Prospect Park to
stimulate developments along neighboring
blocks in all directions, including
the furtherest side from Manhattan.
Albemarle itself is also lined with
Norway maples and punctured by seven
landscaped malls, or medians.
The home was built for real estate
developer George W. May in 1904, according
to the designation report, and
designed by the architect William C.
Lauritzen, who inherited his father
Peter J. Lauritzen’s part in the fi rm
Lauritzen and Voss, but maybe not his
adventurous spirit. Apparently Peter,
having started off a solid career building
Brooklyn social clubs, ran off to
join the Yukon gold rush and never returned
to architecture, spending subsequent
years primarily occupied with
billiards — so says a different preservation
report.
The house is described as a simple
hipped-roof Colonial Revival style that
was once covered with wood clapboard.
The front is defi ned by what the report
called a hipped roof — partially obscured
by the huge trees — and pairs of
Ionic porch posts. The iron-grille double
doors also survived a century of big
families.
Hard to see all of this in the photos,
but the report says there’s a peaked-roof
dormer with three windows, a threesided
oriel with stained-glass windows,
and a three-sided bay and round-arched
roof dormer.
With eight bedrooms and fi ve bathrooms,
it’s asking $2.868 million, and
agent Laura Rozos of Compass knows
the rest. Can you fi nd something to do
with all of that space?
One of the home’s three spacious living
rooms. Compass
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