Last July, YIMBY brought you word of an unusual permit filing at 1580 Nostrand Avenue, in the Flatbush section of central Brooklyn. The application called for a 23-story, 241-foot-tall building, taking up most of the block bounded by Nostrand Avenue, Albemarle Road, East 29th Street, and Tilden Avenue, with frontage on the first three streets.
Now, we’ve obtained renderings of a design for the site, done by Loadingdock5 (although Vincent Martineau is listed as the architect of record on the permit).
Developed by Eli Karp’s Hello Living, the project is likely to be a condo building. The firm specializes in building condos at price points that are more affordable than the typical fare in more established neighborhoods like Prospect Heights or Clinton Hill.
1580 Nostrand Avenue, rendering by Loadingdock5
The design features a taper as the tower reaches skyward (going from up to a dozen apartments on the fourth floor to just three on the 23rd), somewhat minimizing the impact of the building’s height. The tower will be about as tall as 626 Flatbush Avenue, Hudson’s project on the other side of Flatbush, in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, which has caused much consternation (although the architecture for 1580 Nostrand is arguably more attractive than the PTAC-pocked 626 Flatbush, and definitely more interesting).
1580 Nostrand Avenue
The building is planned to have 153 apartments, spread over 129,000 square feet of space. The average unit size of 840 square feet would normally be indicative of rentals, but condos are Hello Living’s bread and butter. With little common area that doesn’t count towards zoning, it’s possible the building will have private keyed elevators, saving on construction costs.
The housing would be perched atop two stories of walk-in medical offices measuring 45,000 square feet, per the permit filing, with the site not far from the hospital complex containing the Kings County and SUNY Downstate medical centers. Taking advantage of this community facility bonus – along with the site’s large footprint (the lot, originally home to a one-story brick warehouse, is more than 54,000 square feet in size) – is what allows Hello Living to reach 23 stories in an R6 zone, where developers normally stick to tenement-scale construction.
Hello Living picked up the development site late last year for more than $13 million, or $76 per buildable square foot including the community facility space – a huge premium over the $4 million that it traded for before that, in 2012.
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