The family manse

This is the house my grandmother grew up in, just off Flatbush Ave in Brooklyn. My great-grandmother (known to my mother and her brother as OtherMother because she could not bear to something as old-sounding as Grandmother) , an interior designer who went to Pratt, was forbidden by her husband to work (it was common, you know) and so instead moved every year around New York (so she would have new places to decorate) until they fell upon this brownstone in Brooklyn, where they stayed for years, selling only after my Grandmother left to get married (eloped, actually, with her mother and in a lovely lavender suit from Saks). This house is legendary in our family; I have pictures of the kitchen and bathroom from the '30's- spectacular subway tile with black trim and a black pedestal sink, with just astounding black, white and wallpaper on the upper half of the wall, featuring the most cunning goldfish, and the kitchen with it's wonderful enamel appliances and gleaming white surfaces. I'm happy to say most of the decorative accesories visible in the pictures are with either me or my mum to this day, as is much of the furniture that fills our houses. My great-grandparents weren't rich, exactly, but they had occasional years of prosperity that allowed them things like the "Big House", as it was called.

This is a house that my own mother never went to (it had been sold, her grandparents having moved to a lovely apartment in Greenwich Village by the time she was born), but she could tell you where the bathrooms were, and where her mother's room was, and who lived in the house across the street because she had heard so many stories over the years. So imagine her surprise when, while reading the New York Times real estate section (she has always done this- I consider it a bizarre form of masochism) this past Sunday, the featured home was the Big House! Reader, she dropped the paper, gathered her husband (who's always up for adventure), got in the car, and drove the 3 hours to Brooklyn for the open house. She introduced herself to the agent, who was quite delighted by this turn of events, took a million pictures, talked to the neighbors, and turned around and came home.

How do you like that?