about eleven hundred square feet
The garden
A brick-walled garden behind the house, used for breakfast, for an afternoon, and for the largest events the house takes. It is a city garden, and this page says what that means rather than what a photograph alone would suggest.
In one table
What is actually out there
- Aspect
- South and west. It is in sun from about eleven in the morning until the roofline takes it at six in the evening.
- Surface
- Brick paving over the terrace nearest the house, and grass beyond it. The grass is not a lawn in February.
- Seating
- A table that seats ten under the pergola, and stacking chairs for twenty more in the garden store.
- Boundary
- A brick wall on three sides, about seven feet, which is what makes it quiet.
- Cooking
- A charcoal grill, which is the only fire permitted in the garden. No fire pit, no pizza oven and nothing propane.
- Lighting
- Festoon lighting on the pergola and along the wall, on a timer that goes off at eleven.
- Access
- Level from the garden apartment. Down an external stair of eight steps from the parlour floor.
A city garden, not a lawn
It is a city garden behind a house in Queens, not a lawn in the country. The elevated line is four minutes' walk away and you can hear it. Between December and the middle of April the garden is closed, the furniture is in store and the terrace is swept but not heated.
None of that is a defect the site is choosing to admit reluctantly; it is what a garden of about eleven hundred square feet behind a house in Queens actually is, and it is a better garden for a warm evening under the pergola than it will ever be for a wedding photograph in the depth of winter.
Whose garden it is on the night
Shared on an apartment booking, exclusive only on the whole house
An apartment is not the house. An apartment booking is a private apartment, not a private house: the other two apartments may be let on the same nights, and the garden, the stoop and the stair are shared. The whole-house let is the one that takes the building off sale.
Taken as the whole house, the garden is genuinely exclusive — “The garden and the terrace table, with nobody else in it” is what the whole-house page promises, and it can, because the whole house has taken every apartment off the calendar as well. Booked as one apartment, the same garden belongs to whichever of the three apartments are occupied that night, and the stoop and the internal stair to it are shared the same way. Nobody on an apartment booking is told the garden is theirs alone, because on most nights it is not.
The garden itself
The wall, the terrace, and the pergola after dark
Book the whole house for the garden to yourself
The garden and the terrace table come with the whole-house let, alongside both kitchens and every apartment in the building.