37 Sidney Place

Sidney Place began as an access road across the Joralemon farm, a prosperous early nineteenth century estate, and took its name in the early 1830s from the Brooklyn attorney George Wood, who chose the sixteenth century English statesman and author Sir Philip Sidney. Brick houses followed through the 1830s and 1840s, among them the four story Greek Revival at number 18 of 1838 and the Chauncey brothers' house at number 2 of about 1846. Number 37 dates to 1846 as well, the year the row that includes its neighbor at 35 was completed, and it still meets the sidewalk on a restored brick front and a grand stoop.

The house sits inside the Brooklyn Heights Historic District, designated by the Landmarks Preservation Commission on November 23, 1965, the first historic district in New York City. At the hearing eight days earlier, Otis Pratt Pearsall of the Brooklyn Heights Association testified that of 1,284 buildings fronting streets within the proposed district, at least 684 predated the Civil War, and that 405 of them were Greek Revival. This is one of the 405. The city tax roll lists the house as built in 1899, a year the Department of City Planning has long used as a stand-in for pre-1900 buildings whose real dates were never recorded.

Baxt Ingui Architects, the Brooklyn practice most closely associated with the borough's Passive House movement, rebuilt the interior over several years with SMR Craftworks as builder. Triple pane windows, an energy recovery ventilator that strips toxins and allergens from the air, and an insulated, airtight envelope all sit behind a facade the Commission controls. There is a small irony in that. The 1965 designation report singled out for criticism the renovations that were eroding the Heights, the added stories, the removed cornices, the rearranged windows. Here the entire intervention is invisible from the sidewalk.

Six levels, every one of them reached by a bronze mirrored elevator. The parlor floor carries eleven and a half foot ceilings and a Nero Marquina marble mantel. The kitchen sets a marble island beneath a triple glazed skylight, with a Lacanche range and Gaggenau and Sub-Zero refrigeration. Six bedrooms and seven baths fill the upper floors, the primary suite opening onto its own terrace and a marble steam shower. Below grade there is a gym, a sauna, and a wine room built into an insulated enclosure. At the top, the skylit room the house calls the treehouse. Two full width terraces look down on a garden that runs roughly seventy five feet back, planted under old growth London plane and Norway maple behind cedar fencing, on automatic irrigation.

The architecture was finished first and the color came after. Sasha Bikoff took six weeks to redress the rooms in jewel tones, plush fabrics, and bold wall coverings, which is how a house built fifteen years before the Civil War ended up looking like this. Farther along the same street, at number 21, stands St. Charles Borromeo, the Gothic Revival church of 1869 by Patrick Charles Kelly, for a parish founded in 1849 as Brooklyn's sixth.

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