168 Plymouth Street

John Wesley Masury made his fortune on a lid. His 1857 and 1859 patents for a thin-top metal paint can, tight enough to seal but easy to pry open, gave John W. Masury and Son a twenty-one year monopoly and turned ready-mixed paint into a product ordinary Americans could buy. The firm assembled this Dumbo block between 1879 and 1894, and by 1901 its factories covered more than an acre and employed 220 hands. Two of its buildings survive as 168 Plymouth Street: an 1891 brick storehouse by architect P. Faust in the American Round Arch style, built with slow-burning mill construction, and the reinforced-concrete daylight factory the company raised beside it in 1919-21, with a chemical laboratory inside and executive offices on the top floor. Masury moved its manufacturing to Baltimore in 1942, and the block stayed industrial for decades under the Brooklyn Varnish Manufacturing Company.

Both structures sit inside the DUMBO Historic District, designated in 2007, and both were taken on by Alloy, the architect-developer, with its own Alloy Design as architect of record. The work finished in 2022 as 46 homes, billed as the neighborhood's last loft conversion, with landscapes by Future Green Studio and a fitness room designed by La Palestra.

The garden residence holds 2,331 square feet at courtyard level, entered through its own door off the planted court. Kitchen, living, and dining run as one room and open to the garden through an oversized glass slider; the RiFRA kitchen carries Miele appliances, cast porcelain counters, a blackened Dornbracht faucet, and an island in bleached white oak. Three bedrooms and a dedicated office sort themselves beyond: a primary suite with an oversized walk-in closet and a bath floored in Haisa marble mosaic with dual Dornbracht showers, a second bedroom with its own ensuite, and a third sharing a full bath with the office. Polished concrete floors and exposed brick run throughout, the factory's bones left in view.