The family love how their kitchen leads to their garden. (David Rozenweig (3))
WHEN PIGS FLY: Pat Kiernan’s daughters have their own floor, with a painting of airborne pigs that came from their former Upper West Side home. (
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The guest bathroom features an NYC map as wallpaper. (
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When NY1 anchor Pat Kiernan, his wife, Dawn, and their daughters, Lucy, 11, and Maeve, 8, moved to Williamsburg last summer, they tested out all the different ways to commute from Brooklyn to work and school in Manhattan.
“We ferried to school, we drove to school, we subway-ed to school,” Kiernan says, “and the subway is definitely the fastest.”
It was just one of the many new things the family had to learn after making the move from an Upper West Side penthouse, with amazing views, to a circa-1900, single-family, vinyl-sided home in the heart of hipsterdom.
In 2007, The Post published an At Home with Kiernan at his Upper West Side apartment. Now that he’s moved, we’ve gone back to him for an At Home With Pat Kiernan, Part Two.
“Maybe this is our midlife crisis,” says Dawn, the VP of marketing for the Nielsen Company. “This is a young, fun neighborhood. So we moved to young and fun.”
And although the area is best known for its youthful vibe, it’s also got a flourishing real estate market — which made it a pretty smart choice for the Kiernans.
“We weren’t planning on moving,” Kiernan says. “But I saw an ad that said ‘Fully renovated townhouse, steps to the L train.’ The L train is the closest train to the kids’ school, Dawn’s office and also to NY1. So the obstacle of the river didn’t seem like such an obstacle anymore.
“I took down the number and forwarded it to Dawn, and she kind of grabbed onto it more than I did. We looked at what it would mean for us — whether we liked this neighborhood, whether it would be fun to have a change, whether it would work out from a financial point of view.”
They thought about holding on to their 2,000-square-foot penthouse (with an 800-square-foot deck) and renting it out, but then a buyer offered them their asking price — $3.8 million.
And though they paid far less for the townhouse, it was a big number for Williamsburg — $2.025 million.
“The idea was to not have so much money tied up in one place,” Kiernan says. “This is more affordable.”
The three-story home is 2,600 square feet, plus an 800-square-foot garden. It includes four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a comfortable family room, a media room, a room-size walk-in cedar closet, a laundry room and a big, open kitchen with a dining area that flows into the garden.
“One of the great things about the house that first attracted us was the combination of the kitchen and the garden and the way it leads into one another,” Kiernan says. “We don’t have the view we had on the Upper West Side, but this feels more inviting.”
And the sellers had just finished a major renovation; the building’s steel, plumbing and electricity were all revamped and modernized.
“We didn’t have to make many big changes at all,” Dawn says. “We really moved only one wall — we made the master bath bigger and the master bedroom smaller. Otherwise, we just made cosmetic changes. We changed the [kitchen cabinet] fronts to a light gray and a simpler style. We also changed the backsplash and painted the island a lighter shade.”
They also tweaked the color of the cherrywood floors, making them less red and more of a rich brown shade. All told, their renovations cost $150,000.
They moved into the house in July 2012. “These things always take so long,” Dawn says. “We bought the house in April and planned to move in the end of June. That didn’t work, so we stayed up on the third floor until the work was done. We finally settled into the whole house in August.”
Where the girls once had a wing of their own in Manhattan, here they have the whole third floor to themselves. Each girl has her own bedroom; they share a bathroom and have a playroom. (There’s also a guest room on that floor.) “They’re on their own up there,” Kiernan says. “The idea of them having their own floor as they grow up is really nice.”
One thing that’s the same as in their old apartment is what they call “The Morning Anchor Door.” It’s a solid pocket door between the master bedroom and bathroom. “When I get up at 3 a.m.,” Kiernan says, “I can tiptoe from the bedroom, close the door and be in my own world. I turn on the radio, turn on TV, and Dawn doesn’t hear any of it.”
The Kiernans installed all sorts of high-tech equipment, like a Sonos wireless multiroom audio system that they turn on via their iPhone. There’s also an iPad installed in the master bathroom that works as a combination TV, Sonos controller and way to check the weather in the morning.
And what looks like an ordinary mirror in the kitchen is MirrorVue — a 32-inch LCD TV. The TV is completely invisible until you turn it on. Turn it off and it vanishes again.
TVs — both visible and invisible — are necessary for a guy who, besides his morning anchoring job on NY1, has hosted several TV game shows. His latest, “Crowd Rules” has been pulled from the CNBC schedule while the cable network tries to figure out what to do next with it.
But Kiernan is undaunted by that. He’s made no secret of the fact that his ultimate dream would be to audition to host “Jeopardy!” That’s after Alex Trebek moves on, of course.
“There’s a certain symmetry to that,” Kiernan says, “because Trebek is Canadian, too.”
Meanwhile, Kiernan is perfectly happy with the decision to move to Williamsburg.
“When we walk into the house, we go down a flight of stairs from the entrance and it opens up into the kitchen and garden,” he says. “It’s kind of a magical view. Some of the street is harsh and busy. But then we make a real transition into our own, private world.”
Pat Kiernan’s
favorite things
* The Sonos music system
* The solar panels the family added to the townhouse
* A long desk the Kiernans call Computer Central for everyone in the family
* A sculpture of a Canadian Mountie that keeps the family in touch with their Canadian roots
* The Holly Hunt dining-room table
* The MirrorVue TV in a mirror
* The map of Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens, which they had blown up and made into wallpaper in the guest bathroom; they added a Google Pin Drop on their new location.
* The 8-by-8-foot painting of flying pigs that they had in their old apartment; it had to be cut down and disassembled to fit the wall on the Kiernans’ new third floor.