Tour 7 Charming New York Brownstones (2024)

“I’ve got a special business technique,” actor John Leguizamo jokes, “I like to buy high and sell low.” From the kitchen of his New York City brownstone, built in the mid-1800s and purchased in 2008 with the intention of raising his family there,The Menustar is all smiles. “[We] did an incredible gut reno that I oversaw every day. We did it in one year.”

When Leguizamo and his wife, Justine, first saw the townhouse, it was divided into three separate apartments. Inexplicably, in one, the previous tenants had broken the original molding and placed a giant black porcelain tub in the middle of the space. To get it closer to their vision, Justine dreamed up a floor plan and John managed the construction to implement it. “She has certain ideas, and I try to execute them,” he explains of their approach. “But all the plumbing had to be redone; the floors had to be redone. Nothing was small; it was all massive amounts of work.”

Once construction was finished in 2009, they moved in without a specific design concept in mind beyond John’s goal of “maintaining the beauty and structure of the building,” as he describes it, and a desire to fill their home with antiques collected to be shared across generations.

“We like things that are quality, that we can pass on to our kids,” John says. “There’s something beautiful about hanging on to things that have a history…. We like the eclectic feel.” —Maria Sherman

An Elevated, Kid-Friendly Brooklyn Townhouse

A Brooklyn brownstone is distinct from other such homes, as architects Christopher Lee and Minyoung Song of New York–based Model Practice will avouch. When Lee, Song, and designers Amanda Jesse and Whitney Parris-Lamb of interior design studio Jesse Parris-Lamb were tasked with reviving a circa 1890 townhouse in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, their maiden discovery was an incomplete Victorian-age ceramic speaking tube that served as confirmation of this theory. The tube itself wasn’t significant, but it did hold a mirror to the home’s past, and unbeknownst to them at the time, served as a foreshadowing of its future.

A series of back-to-back events—including the birth of their first child, the onset of the pandemic, and, subsequently, a lack of space in their 1.5-bedroom apartment—led the homeowners, a couple in their 40s, to move into the property earlier than anticipated. “It was actually great because it taught us a lot of things we needed to know, and we got to experience the character and spirit of the house as it was, and that informed the design process,” says one half of the couple, a graphic designer. Given that the previous homeowner hadn’t updated the space in decades, there was a lot of work to be done, including replacing the roof and fixing a plethora of leaks of unknown origin. At some point, an offending addition was introduced in the back, which now desperately needed an update.

The couple saw the misfortunes as an opportunity to start afresh and organize the townhouse in a way that would suit their modern lifestyle. For example, they were keen that the home feature a senior-friendly guest suite for their parents, who would previously stay in hotels when visiting. And so Lee and Song arranged the spaces across the section of the building, designating one floor for each generation. The parents’ floor, created at the garden level, was particularly significant because it afforded ease of access and age-in-place interventions. The second floor was conceived as a sanctuary for the couple, while the third was outfitted with bedrooms, a playroom, and a reading nook for their kids (they welcomed another child while the project was in progress). Meanwhile, the kitchen, living, and dining areas were carved out on the parlor floor. —Vaishnavi Nayel Talawadekar

A Townhome That Elegantly Modernizes Turn-of-the-20th-Century Grandeur