The row Harteau had built
The east side of Carlton Avenue between Willoughby and DeKalb went up in two campaigns. Thomas Fagan's five brownstones at 203 to 211 came around 1866; a decade earlier, around 1856, a plainer row of five brick houses was raised at 213 to 221, three for Whitson Colyer and two, 219 and 221, for Henry Harteau. Harteau was a stone and plate-glass merchant who became a Brooklyn alderman, sat on the Board of Education and organized the Mechanics and Traders Exchange as its first president. When he died in 1895 his will paid for the Lafayette monument in Prospect Park.
The 1978 Landmarks report describes the row as early Italianate with ornament kept sparse: rusticated brownstone basements, full-length parlor windows on table sills, flush stone lintels and simple bracketed wooden cornices. It notes the basement and parlor windows survive at No. 219. The facade is red brick over that brownstone base, with a high stoop and cast-iron railings.
Inside the 20 feet
The parlor floor runs front to back under tall ceilings, with plaster medallions, parquet laid with a ribbon inlay and a contemporary gas fireplace set into a low black wall. The kitchen at the rear is flat-panel millwork around a Carrara marble island, lit by a multi-pane picture window and a glass door onto an Ipe deck. From the deck the view is tree canopy and a Gothic steeple; the record places St. Mark's Episcopal, an 1888 Gothic Revival church on Adelphi Street, on the back side of the block, its rear lot beginning two doors up from No. 219. Steps lead down to a stone-paved garden.
Upstairs the bedrooms keep their sash windows, marble mantels with cast-iron arched fireboxes and curved archways. The baths are subway tile and mosaic floors with soaking tubs. The listing credits a 2007 renovation to The Brooklyn Studio for the infrastructure; the city's lot record shows an alteration in 2006.
The numbers
The house is configured as an owner's triplex over a garden rental, on a 20 by 100 foot lot in the Fort Greene Historic District. City records put the built floor area at 1.6 against an allowed 2.0, which is where the roughly 800 square feet of unused FAR comes from; the listing itself cautions that landmarks and zoning feasibility need verifying before anyone builds on it. Full basement with a wine cellar, new roof, recently replaced boiler.
