
Details:
Price: $6,500,000 ($1,273 monthly taxes)
Specs: 5 bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms
Extras: Set up as a three-bedroom rental duplex upstairs with separate kitchen and an owner’s triplex with two bedrooms downstairs where the extras include a den, office, wet bar, and private garden.
10-minute walking radius: Brooklyn Heights Promenade, Montero’s Bar and Grill, The Long Island Bar, Books Are Magic
Listed by: Kevin Carberry, Kevin Carberry Real Estate
Margaret Jones was born in Brooklyn, and her family wanted her to stay there. But at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied history in the early 1960s, she met a young architect who brought her all the way to Maine. Her father, Thomas R. Jones, was a former New York State assemblyman, a judge, and an advocate for civil rights who helped create the Bed-Stuy Restoration Corporation. A bold planner, Jones and his wife, Bertha, thought of a way to bring their daughter back, a temptation that her young architect husband would not be able to resist: a dump of a house that needed him.
27 State Street had three apartments, a store on the ground level that was filled with junk, and a cellar. It dated back to 1848 and needed a gut renovation. “I was looking for a wreck,” said their son-in-law, Wids DeLaCour Jr. “And it was a wreck.”
DeLaCour was inspired by the clean lines of homes by his UPenn professor, the architect Louis Sauer; by the homes of his father’s Quaker family; and by the use of wood in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Suntop Homes. Margaret also inspired him, asking for a kitchen off the garden so she could pass food straight outside. “That was a big improvement in the design,” DeLaCour said. He looked for opportunities to frame rooms around a view of that garden and to bring light inside, and looked for ways to incorporate natural materials — stripping down walls to expose 19th-century stonework and paneling surfaces with lumber from the trees around his parents’ house in Pennsylvania. The place took two years to perfect, and when architect friends visited the finished product, they would sometimes comment that the house wasn’t “very urban,” or was a bad fit for Brooklyn. That, DeLaCour stressed, was his point. He thought of the house as a respite, a retreat. His in-laws got it and stopped by often, spending Christmas dinners there and enjoying the nearby grandkids — the rewards of their ambitious plan.


Other architects got it too. The address won a 1975 award in residential design from the AIA with its photo published in the New York Times. That was good timing for DeLaCour, establishing him as an architect with style just as his generation was buying up Brooklyn’s stock of older townhomes. Working with a partner, DeLaCour renovated other townhouses and built blocks of brand-new houses, including the development known as Columbia Terrace, before going on to specialize in building affordable housing.
The DeLaCours raised three children in the house before Margaret died in 2008. “I was a vegetable for a year or so,” said DeLaCour. Then, in 2010, he met Sally Williams-Allen, who had returned to the U.S. after a career as an administrator at INSEAD, an international school in France. She remembered opening the front door and finding herself staring out into the garden — an ideal view. They married there a few years later, and she understood that 27 State Street was a reflection of Wids: his appreciation for the sources of materials, his flair and style. “I loved it all the way,” she said.
DeLaCour is self-effacing. “I was inexperienced and young,” he says of the design. But 50 years later, the home is still his calling card. “It was the best example of what I could do.”