At 25 Cranberry St. in Brooklyn Heights, a Revolutionary War-era farmhouse emerges from obscurity for the first time in three decades \u2014 and it may be the most authentic address in New York City.<\/p>\n
From the sidewalk, it announces itself quietly, its Federal frame stepping just slightly forward from its neighbors, as though reluctant to fully blend in. Inside, wide-plank floors \u2014 their wood arriving centuries ago as ship ballast from England, offloaded in the colonies before being planed and laid \u2014 run the length of rooms that still read like an early American home: a parlor, a library, three woodburning fireplaces, and stairwells with their original banisters intact. The walls, stripped back to their first chalky patina, carry the ochre and indigo hues of plaster that hasn\u2019t been papered over, painted out, or touched since long before this city had its grid.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything original has been saved,\u201d Joan Goldberg of Brown Harris Stevens, who holds listing, told The Post. Goldberg has now brought the property to market at $4.9 million \u2014 the first public offering since 1995. She has handled perhaps two other properties like this in her career spanning more than two decades.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis house is in a class by itself,\u201d Goldberg said.<\/p>\n
A late-1700s townhouse in Brooklyn Heights has hit the market offering something almost unheard of in New York real estate \u2014 a nearly untouched slice of history that quite literally stands out from the block. Virginia Carey for Brown Harris Stevens<\/p>\n
The late-18th-century Federal farmhouse at 25 Cranberry St. in Brooklyn Heights has come to market for the first time since 1995, asking $4.9 million. Virginia Carey for Brown Harris Stevens<\/p>\n
Built in the very late 1700s and formally recorded by the New York City Registrar in 1828 \u2014 during a period when the city was reconstituting property records lost to fire and flood \u2014 25 Cranberry predates the street grid imposed on Brooklyn Heights and most of what would become the borough\u2019s residential fabric.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Goldberg, who studied architectural history sleuthing through the Municipal Art Society, explains that the city\u2019s recording of all structures in the 1820s was a bureaucratic fresh start. The house, she believes, is likely from around 1790 to 1795.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone with any knowledge of the building styles feels that,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The building\u2019s very floorboards carry a transatlantic story. Massive logs crossed the Atlantic as ballast in trading ships, stabilizing the vessels on their westward voyages. Once unloaded on these shores, the timber was planed into the very planks that survive underfoot today.<\/p>\n
The four-story, roughly 3,263-square-foot wood-frame house is thought to be the last original of its kind available in the neighborhood. Virginia Carey for Brown Harris Stevens<\/p>\n
The plaster walls were stripped back to their first ochre and indigo pigment. Virginia Carey forBrown Harris Stevens<\/p>\n
Its floors were built from English timber that crossed the Atlantic as ship ballast. Virginia Carey for Brown Harris Stevens<\/p>\n
By some combination of fortune and landmark protection, the house survived intact while its neighbors were modernized, subdivided or rebuilt entirely. It is, by Goldberg\u2019s reckoning, the last original wood-frame farmhouse in Brooklyn Heights available for purchase.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is the occasional wood-frame house here and there,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is the last original one.\u201d<\/p>\n
When art dealer Peter Freeman and Elisabeth Cunnick purchased the property in 1995, they found a house that had accumulated decades of postwar improvements: layered flooring, papered-over walls, the residue of mid-century taste. Rather than clear it all and start fresh \u2014 what Goldberg pointedly refuses to call a gut renovation (\u201cIf you were a fisherman you have to gut your fish,\u201d she says, \u201cI don\u2019t think it should be gutting a house\u201d) \u2014 the couple worked in the opposite direction entirely.<\/p>\n
They pulled up 1950s and 1960s flooring to reveal the extraordinary original planks beneath. They stripped the walls of accumulated wallpaper, layer by layer, until they reached the first plaster and its original pigment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Featured in World of Interiors in 2005, the property embodies Cunnick\u2019s own philosophy: \u201cThere\u2019s a thin line between a fine carelessness and squalor.\u201d Brown Harris Stevens<\/p>\n
The home was purchased in 1995 by art dealer Peter Freeman and Conjunctions fiction editor Elisabeth Cunnick, who spent years painstakingly reversing decades of postwar layering to restore the house to its original simplicity. Brown Harris Stevens<\/p>\n
The owners restored the home, filling it along the way with works by Sigmar Polke, Donald Judd, Richard Serra, Claes Oldenburg and Richard Tuttle. Brown Harris Stevens<\/p>\n
Freeman, a New England native with a connoisseur\u2019s instinct for early American furniture \u2014 he started collecting 17th-century pieces while at Harvard \u2014 applied to the house the same archaeological patience he brought to his gallery work, which included exhibitions of Ellsworth Kelly and Gerhard Richter mounted for institutions, not commerce.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Cunnick, meanwhile, brought her own acute sensibility: she had served as fiction editor at the renowned literary journal Conjunctions before founding A\/D, a firm that commissioned living artists to create functional objects for production.<\/p>\n
The house became a container for both lives: a 1964 Sigmar Polke drawing in the dining room, hand-blown glass vases by Jennifer Bartlett on a circa-1840 New Hampshire table, a Claes Oldenburg plaster sculpture, desks by Donald Judd, a wire sculpture by Richard Tuttle. A solid-lead cylindrical work by Richard Serra from 1968 shares space with a 17th-century Italian coral tree and paper picnic plates by Roy Lichtenstein<\/a>. A Chinese altarpiece dating to around 3000 BC sits inside the original carved-wood fireplace alongside a Tuttle piece from 1971. On one wall, the trompe-l\u2019oeil painting Almanac and Pipe by John F. Peto from the 1890s; in the library, a marble-topped gu\u00e9ridon signed by its Belgian maker, Jean-Joseph Chapuis, circa 1815.<\/p>\n The result was, in the couple\u2019s own framing, something deliberately unfinished. The kitchen ceiling still exposes its laths. A naked lightbulb remained because no fixture ever fully satisfied. The dining table was, for years, a hollow-core door on aluminum trestles.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a thin line between a fine carelessness and squalor,\u201d Cunnick observed \u2014 a formulation that became something of a household motto and the philosophical spine of the entire project.<\/p>\n The entryway. Virginia Carey for Brown Harris Stevens<\/p>\n