266 Berry Street

On April 3, 2023, an application for 266 Berry Street went to the Department of Buildings under job B00845503, and the class it was filed in tells the story before the description does: Alt-CO, the category the city reserves for a New Building with Existing Elements to Remain. The lot is Block 2404, Lot 27, twenty feet of frontage and seventy-five of depth on the west side of Berry between South 1st and South 2nd. What stood on it was a four-story, three-family house of 39 feet. What the filing proposed was a single-family house of 54 feet, framed new at every level, and that is the house that stands there now: the most expensive house for sale in Williamsburg, and one of the four priciest houses on the market in Brooklyn.

The developer was Distilled Properties, and the design is credited to the architectural designer Patrocinio Binuya, with Yahaira M. Volquez Colombo of Colombo Architectural Studio as architect of record. The structural filing that followed in May 2023, by the engineers Joseph K. Blum Co., is the document where the ambition sits in plain language: new floor framing at all levels, a new rear wall in masonry, a new roof bulkhead and, written into the structure from the first drawing, framing for a hot tub on the roof. Plans were approved on August 16, 2023. The first permit issued that December. Erland Contracting built it under the city's special inspections, and the structural work was signed off on June 26, 2025. A sprinkler system for the whole house was signed off in April 2026. Three years of filings, and every one of them closed.

The permits count five stories over a cellar. The plan counts seven levels and names each one. The Retreat, in the cellar, holds a steam shower, a glass-enclosed sauna and a cedar-clad lounge fitted beneath the stair, on radiant floors behind acoustically treated walls. The Garden level is the kitchen, dark-stained oak around a stone island, and its rear wall is glass that retracts entirely, so that nothing stands between the island and the lawn, the mature tree, the raised planted terrace and the outdoor kitchen. The Gallery above carries a wet bar and a structural glass terrace stepping down to the garden. The Guest level holds two suites, each with its own bath on radiant floors. The Primary is one suite across the full floor, with a biofuel fireplace and a wet bar built into the dressing room. The Horizon is the roof: the hot tub the engineers framed for, an outdoor shower, a second outdoor kitchen, irrigated planting, a half bath and a motorized pergola carrying heat and light. A ship's ladder rises once more to the Apex, a seat above the whole house with Manhattan across the river.

Pale plaster and limestone run through every level along a stair with a black vertical-slat balustrade, the one line the eye follows from the cellar to the roof. IMG and Sachigusa Yasuda staged the rooms lightly; the materials carry them.

Berry Street was Third Street until Williamsburgh renamed its numbered avenues, and the third one went to Abraham J. Berry, the physician who stayed at his post through the cholera of 1832 and was elected the first mayor when Williamsburgh became a city in 1852. The city lasted three years before Brooklyn absorbed it; the name stayed. The street has been an Open Street since 2020 and was rebuilt in 2023 as a bike boulevard from Broadway to North 12th. Two blocks west, past Wythe and Kent, Domino Park runs along the river from Grand Street to South 5th.

The tax roll still stamps the lot 1899, the same year it gives its five neighbours. The record that matters now runs from April 2023 to April 2026, and it describes a different house entirely.

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