Woodside, NY · restored 2019
About the house
Three self-contained apartments in a restored house in Woodside, Queens — booked one at a time, or the whole house for a gathering. Fifteen minutes from Midtown, with a garden and a kitchen that will take a crowd.
What the building is
Everything below is true of the same building on the same afternoon — the first four lines by what the house has, and the last two by what it deliberately does not.
What the house has
- A three-storey house of 1912, brick over a raised garden level, restored in 2019 and let as three self-contained apartments
- Each apartment has its own front door, its own key code, its own kitchen and its own bathroom
- A shared garden of about eleven hundred square feet behind the house, with a table that seats ten
- A second kitchen on the parlour floor, built for cooking at scale, which is what makes a whole-house let work
What it does not have
- A stoop of five steps to the parlour floor and a stair to every floor above the garden level
- No lift, no front desk, no porter and no daily housekeeping — this is a house, and it is let as one
It is a house, restored and let as one, and it reads best as one: the apartment pages and the whole-house page describe the same rooms from two different starting points rather than four different buildings.
The restoration
The restoration, finished in 2019, kept more of the original house than it replaced. The parlour floor is the original 1912 pine and it was refinished once, in 2019. It will not survive being refinished a second time. There are slippers in the hall cupboard.
The front rooms of the original house, with the bay window, the twelve-foot ceiling and the plaster cornice that the restoration kept. It is the largest of the three and the one people book when they want the house to look like the photographs.
Keeping the original frames is not free of a cost, and the house says so on the apartment page rather than only here: “The bay window is single-glazed on the inner sash, because the restoration kept the original frames — the front bedroom hears Roosevelt Avenue” The bathroom on that floor kept the same instinct — a walk-in shower, a basin in the original marble, and a window. — and it is the kind of decision a restoration makes once and lives with rather than one it can revisit every season.
One building, let two ways
The second decision was not architectural. Once the house was sound, it could be let as three self-contained apartments — each with its own front door, its own key code, its own kitchen and its own bathroom — or as one house to one party, with the internal doors unlocked and the garden and both kitchens included. Nothing about the rooms changes between the two; what changes is whether the building is divided between separate arrivals or given to one of them. The three apartments and the whole house each have their own page, and a night sold one way removes the other from the calendar, because it is one building rather than four separate ones.
That is the whole story: a restoration, and a decision about how to let what came out of it. It is a restored building with a booking system, and the honest version of what that system will and will not do is on its own page, along with everything else this house does not do.
See the two ways to book it
One apartment at a time, or the whole house for a gathering. The rates page runs the arithmetic between them on one screen.