helley Victory gestures into the front parlor of her limestone
townhouse, whose walls and ceilings are covered with elaborate
plaster relief decoration in varying states of repair, from
nil to perfection. “Look at this plasterwork!” she exclaims.
“Isn’t it obnoxious?”
She doesn’t mean obnoxious in a pejorative sense, of course. It’s
Victory’s synonym for fabulous, over-the-top, beyond belief. And
indeed it is. Victory conjectures that her unusual house, one of
a row on a leafy Bedford-Stuyvesant block designed by architect
John E. Dwyer in the last decade of the nineteenth century, was
“more than likely” decorated by the developer expressly to show off
the plasterwork options available to buyers in the neighborhood’s
then-booming new-home market. That may explain why motifs
vary from florals and scrollwork to swags and even musical instruments
throughout the parlor floor.
The house boasts an abundance of original woodwork as well,
including exuberant fretwork spanning the parlor, five carved
wood fireplace mantels, and intact door and window trim, albeit all
“covered with a good eight layers of paint,” Victory says, when she
bought the house in 2007.
Though the house served as a rooming house for decades, the
overall layout survived largely intact and without partitions, and
its detail remarkably so. Still, more than a century of wear and tear
took its toll, and many prospective buyers were daunted by the degree
of restoration required. But not Victory, a native New Yorker,
raised in Queens, who had bought a condo in Bed Stuy five years
earlier while continuing to covet the brownstones she saw on the
neighborhood’s annual house tour.
Victory first spotted her plasterwork palace at a realtor’s open
house, along with about fifteen other people. “They saw all of this
plasterwork and said, ‘Oh, this is disgusting,’” and talked about
wanting to gut the house, she recalls. It was the very first house
she’d seen once she started seriously looking. Victory made an
offer, but the deal didn’t pan out, and she spent the next year
looking at about twenty more houses. But they weren’t as wide,
they weren’t four stories and they weren’t as decoratively fabulous.
Eventually she circled back and found that the house was still
available. This time, Victory closed the deal, installing herself on
the two lower floors.
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