Standing outside his new Park Slope project, 580 Carroll, developer Sean Ludwick gestures toward the glassy, modern apartment building, a half-smoked cigar in his hand.
“This isn’t good business,” he says. “This is good design.”
The work of starchitect Enrique Norten (whose projects include One York in TriBeCa and the in-the-works Grupo Habita-operated hotel near the High Line), the building certainly has an impressive pedigree — especially for a 17-unit condo development on a not-quite-prime block of Park Slope.
And Ludwick is likely right about the business side of things, as well. Midway through the project, located between Fourth and Fifth avenues, he and his partner, Ashwin Verma, unsuccessfully petitioned the Board of Standards and Appeals to build an additional three townhouses on the property. They claimed that they’d encountered hardships during construction of the development. (“We conceptualized it at the top of the market,” he says. “So we had a lot of gusto.”)
But good business and good design aren’t inherently in conflict.
Few housing markets boomed bigger than Brooklyn’s over the past decade. And as new buyers came to the borough, new ideas about what apartments should look like arrived with them.
The real estate run-up might have inspired its share of cookie-cutter condos, but it also fostered a demand for fresh, modern design that had previously been in short supply in Brooklyn. Developers created glassy exteriors for buildings like On Prospect Park in Prospect Heights and the Viridian in Greenpoint. And modern adaptations of townhouse living cropped up on Boerum Hill’s State Street and at the Third & Bond building in the Gowanus.
“When we first started working in Brooklyn back in 1998, there was a lot less interest in unapologetically modern design,” says Clay Miller, a principal, along with Francelle Lim, at architecture firm Bergen Street Studio. “What started to happen was that young townhouse buyers buying outside of the landmarked districts began calling up and saying, ‘I don’t like anything about the interior of this house — can we take everything out?’ ”
“We started getting those phone calls around 2000,” Miller says. “About the same time, Smith Street stopped being a methadone clinic and became restaurant row.”
Architect Jeff Sherman of Delson or Sherman Architects recalls a similar transformation.
“It happened almost immediately after we moved out here ourselves, so sometime around 1999,” he says. “It’s sort of what we ended up building a practice on.”
Literary agent Ann Rittenberg was one of those clients who called Sherman for an update of her classic Park Slope brownstone.
“In modern life, you don’t have staff back behind the swinging door in the kitchen,” says Rittenberg, who renovated her home in 2006 and opened up and expanded the brownstone’s kitchen, letting it flow into the dining room.
And Sherman converted what Rittenberg describes as “a warren of little rooms” downstairs into an open TV room and workspace.
“It just became so much more livable,” she says. “I had no interest doing a period piece.”
Key to bringing modern design to classic Brooklyn buildings, Sherman says, is deciding which older bits to discard and which to keep.
“In one case, there might be some beautiful old floors. In another case, it might be the stairs,” he says.
And then there are those who want to just toss out the whole brownstone idea altogether.
Sandra Schpoont and her husband moved to a three-bedroom condo in the Richard Meier-designed On Prospect Park building in April after living for 20 years in a Park Slope brownstone that Schpoont “never really liked.”
For two decades, she tried to give the townhouse a modern feel — with limited success.
“I tried to turn it into a Santa Fe-style house,” she says. “I tried to modernize the kitchen. I tried to buy more modern furniture. It didn’t really work.”
When On Prospect Park hit the market (with many units priced at more than $1,000 per square foot, high for Brooklyn) in late 2006, Schpoont jumped at the chance to buy.
“It was a dream of mine to live in a modern building,” she says. “It’s beautiful, the way that it’s designed.”
Fashion designer Daniel Silver moved to the building with his partner this January. Also drawn there by the modern design, the couple uses it as a second home of sorts, leaving their West Village apartment for their Brooklyn pad on weekends.
“It’s just a beautiful building. It’s exquisitely designed,” Silver says.
Not everyone feels that way, though. One afternoon, Schpoont was standing at Grand Army Plaza looking at the development’s glassy façade. A man next to her spoke up.
“He said, ‘I can’t believe people are paying $1 million to live in that monstrosity,’ ” she recalls.
There’s also the question of whether buyers and developers who were willing to take a chance on more modern architecture during the boom times are still willing to experiment post-crash.
“Back in the heyday, people took risks,” Ludwick says. “Now risk is gone.”
Although, if his own building is any indication, there’s still a decent amount of modern love in Brooklyn. Since starting sales in April, 580 Carroll has sold five of its 17 units (one-, two- and three-bedrooms from $675,000 to $1.4 million). Also in Park Slope, at 232 Seventh St., the Seven on Seven building, designed by Miller and Lim, has sold four of its six condos since starting sales last fall (two-bedrooms for $529,000).
And, of course, there’s no putting a price on catching your neighbors’ eyes. Across the street, a pair of passersby pause to gawk at 580 Carroll’s glass and concrete façade. Ludwick points them out.
“You see that all the time,” he says. “People stopping and looking at the building. Whether they like it or not, they’re thinking about it.”