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Curbed

More and more developers are scouring the Earth to source materials from the most unconventional places, both remote and local, in an attempt to bring the rarest of rare finishes to their projects. With NYC’s luxury market on the decline, “the devil is in the details for developers, who in a packed luxury condo market are competing over a limited number of qualified buyers,” says the Wall Street Journal.

We’ve seen our share of condos with some of these unusual finishes. But it’s not just condo developers doing it. Houses are getting in on the action too. Below we’ve rounded up some of the homes in our past coverage that have finishes as exclusive as marble from the old MoMA to a Queens mansion with details from the World’s Fair.

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Wall Street Journal

Then there’s a green-gray variety of Petersen brick made only in the Sønderborg region of Denmark. “Going to Denmark in the dead of winter for 48 hours wasn’t the first thing on my [to-do] list,” says Jeffrey Gershon, head of Hope Street Capital, who made the trip to buy 25,000 square feet of the material. The coal-fired brick, colored by the natural mineral composition of the Danish clay, completed the look for his 33-unit Brooklyn condo project, The Hendrik, where prices range from about $1.7 million to $4.5 million.

Appraisers say fancy finishes can move buyers. At 70 Vestry, a 46-unit tower in Tribeca designed by the firm of Robert A.M. Stern, developer Related Cos. tapped stone experts to find the perfect limestone facade for its Hudson River views: a café-au-lait-colored stone with rosy hues at dusk.

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The Real Deal

With fewer and fewer buyers willing to fork out tens of millions for New York apartments, developers are searching the world over for materials no one else has.

In this market, buyers can be picky and creating something unique is a requisite for staying competitive. In an effort to lure well-heeled buyers, developers are going to forests in Austria, the south of France and even to find a particular type of Danish brick clay, the Wall Street Journal reported.

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Real Estate Weekly

Hopestreet Capital’s new Hendrik condominium project is offering would-be residents an escape hatch from townhouse living. The building, which is still under construction, is providing buyers the chance to bypass the inconveniences of living in Brooklyn while living in Brooklyn.

“Not everybody wants to live in a townhouse,” said Hopestreet Capital Partner Sha Dinour. “I live in a townhouse. You have to go up and down the stairs all the time. It’s hard. People love to live in a townhouse street. But not everybody loves to live in a townhouse.”

Dinour said that his firm’s new project, which is located at 509 Pacific Street, nullifies two barriers to living in Boerum Hill: the high cost of buying a townhouse and the additional cost for renovations. “In this neighborhood, because it’s mostly townhouses, there’s either a very high threshold of purchase price to buy in this neighborhood. And then, for the most part, you have to take on renovations that could be costly and a headache. And not everybody has the stomach for it,” Dinour said.

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Mansion Global

Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens—three adjacent neighborhoods in Brooklyn—used to be known just by their actual names. Then real estate developers began referring to the area as BoCoCa as a marketing tool for selling new condos to Manhattanites in search of more space for less money. But now, the area southwest of downtown Brooklyn has a new moniker—“Little France,” or “Little Paris,” depending on whom you’re speaking to.

The emergence of several dual-language public schools in the area, followed by French shops and restaurants such as Provence en Boite and Bien Cuit, have over the past few years attracted quite the community of French nationals who have taken up residence in the neighborhood. The number of French vacationers visiting Brooklyn is also on the rise.

While it is true that French-speaking expats in New York City—thought to total around 180,000, when including patois and cajun—live all over, Brooklyn has a particularly large enclave, with around 3,000 French families estimated to be living in Carroll Gardens alone, according to the French Embassy.

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Real Estate Weekly

Sales have begun at The Hendrik, a new Boerum Hill condominium with 33 spacious residences.

Located 509 Pacific Street, the Hendrick was developed by Hopestreet and designed by Beyer Blinder Belle.

The 33 units range from two- through four-bedrooms priced from $1.625 million, three bedrooms are priced from $2.5 million, and four-bedrooms are priced from $2.9 million.

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New York Observer

Has Brooklyn peaked? Not by a long shot, judging by the influx of high-end residential development. “In general, what’s coming on the market now is a more sophisticated product,” Brendan Aguayo, the managing director at Halstead Property Development Marketing, told the Observer. “It’s trying to introduce a higher caliber product, and these new units are a bit larger than what’s typically found in the Brooklyn market.”

For Aguayo, there’s only one neighborhood in Brooklyn that’s going to see a larger number of foreign residents.

“In downtown Brooklyn, we do see a heavy contingent of foreign buyers—either as a pied-à-terre, investment or for their kids,” he noted. “From an outside perspective, downtown Brooklyn is becoming a 24-hour live-and-work neighborhood, which is seen as very sexy.”

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YIMBY

Back in April, the first partial renderings were revealed of the six-story, 33-unit mixed-use building planned at 509 Pacific Street, in Boerum Hill, located within two blocks of stops of on the 2, 3, 4, 5, B, D, N, Q, and R trains and Atlantic Terminal. Now, the first full rendering of the building, dubbed the Hendrik, has been revealed by the New York Times. The latest permits indicate the project will encompass 114,812 square feet.

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The New York Times,

The Hendrik, a new condominium under construction in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, aims to blend the space and character of the neighborhood’s coveted townhouses with the amenities of a new residential tower.

“The townhouse market is restrictive — they’re expensive and there are not a lot of them,” said Jeffrey Gershon, a principal of Hopestreet, the developer of the six-story building. For families who are outgrowing their current apartments and want to be in Boerum Hill, he added, the Hendrik is envisioned as “somewhere to live when they’re shut out of the townhouse market.”

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Curbed

Despite the proliferation of new developments going up in Boerum Hill (and not to mention the boom in nearby Downtown Brooklyn), apparently the neighborhood is “underdeveloped” residentially. So says Stephen G. Kliegerman, the president of Halstead, which is working on sales for the Hendrik, a six-story, 33-unit condo at the corner of Pacific and Atlantic Streets. The development, which is rising on the site of a former Walgreen’s, recently launched sales, and is the subject of a profile in the Times real estate section this weekend.

But the building is targeting a very specific audience: families. According to Jeffrey Gershon, one of the principals at developer Hopestreet, the building is seen as “somewhere to live when they’re shut out of the townhouse market.” (Oh, sure, okay.) Accordingly, the apartments will be pretty big; the smallest is a two-bedroom unit, and the largest will measure more than 2,000 square feet. Amenities include a gym, children’s playroom, roof terrace, and the inevitable dog-washing station.

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