1806 Ditmas Avenue

Erected 1909, architect Chappell and Bosworth, for Henry L. Quick. That is the whole entry for No. 1806 in the Landmarks Preservation Commission's 1981 report on the Ditmas Park Historic District, and it is more than most houses get: the Commission read the deeds and the Department of Buildings dockets for every lot in the district, and the line for block 5204, lot 1, the southwest corner of Ditmas Avenue and East 18th Street, comes back with a date, an architect and a first owner. The report describes what it found there as a two-story-and-attic dwelling with a brick first floor and a shingle second, a hip roof with double-hip-roofed dormers and an open porch on brick piers, and it notes that the flattened roof lines and deep eaves lean toward the Craftsman mode while the bulk of the house is Colonial Revival. It is one of the few houses in the district built with a brick first story; most of Ditmas Park is frame.

George P. Chappell was one of the more prolific Brooklyn architects of the 1880s, working in the Queen Anne and Romanesque Revival modes. His St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church of 1886 to 1890 on Pacific Street is a designated landmark, and he designed the Tompkins Avenue Congregational Church in 1889. In 1899 he took Charles Bosworth into partnership, and Chappell and Bosworth ran until 1929, mostly on factories and warehouses, among them 97 to 103 Horatio Street in what is now the Gansevoort Market Historic District. A freestanding house on a Flatbush corner was a departure for them. The brick base, the wide eaves and the porch piers read like a warehouse architect's idea of a suburban villa: heavier, plainer and better built than the shingle houses on either side.

The land was the Van Ditmarsen farm, held by one family from the late seventeenth century until the real estate broker Lewis H. Pounds bought the tract between Ocean Avenue and the Brighton line in 1902. Pounds graded it, laid the sewers, sidewalks and paved streets, planted the malls with maples, lindens and tulip trees, and sold lots under restrictions that allowed only one-family houses set back behind wide lawns. Most of the district was built before the First World War, which is why it reads as one place, and the Commission designated it on July 28, 1981. Pounds went on to be Brooklyn Borough President from 1913 to 1917. In 2019 the Brooklyn Eagle's Lore Croghan walked the district and picked this corner, and this house, as one of her five stops.

The Corcoran listing puts it at about 5,500 square feet on three floors over a finished lower level: seven bedrooms and four and a half baths, original millwork, stained glass and three working fireplaces. The dining room keeps its dark-stained box-beam ceiling, paneled wainscot and glass-front built-ins; a stained-glass window lights the stair landing. The library faces south and the eat-in kitchen faces east, renovated with a 48-inch Viking double oven beside the exposed brick of the chimney, and opens to the rear deck and garden. The primary suite has two exposures, a walk-in closet and a windowed bath with a soaking tub and separate shower; the third floor keeps a cast-iron tub and a media room under the roof. Below, with its own entrance, a game room with billiards and shuffleboard, a wet bar, a three-person sauna, a gym, a spa bath, a utility kitchen, laundry and a wine cellar. Split-system cooling, a new roof with solar panels, a long private driveway and a brick two-car garage on a lot the city records at 8,800 square feet. The last recorded sale was in July 2024. The 1909 entry still describes the house from the sidewalk.

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