Bidding on a Brooklyn Brownstone, With a Baby on the Way. Which One Did They Buy?

When Liuyu Ivy Chen first met Henry M. Clever, his bed was under a piano.

In 2014, Mr. Clever was living in a tiny apartment in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, with no furniture aside from a rented Steinway grand. At night, he would curl up on a twin mattress beneath the piano, relying on it to block the sun. By day, he would have gatherings with fellow New York University students. At one of them, Ms. Chen — a native of Zhejiang, China, who had recently arrived to study creative writing — played the piano alongside him. The two fell in love.

“The piano is what brought us together,” Ms. Chen said.

The couple married in 2016, and then moved into a one-bedroom rental in Manhattan in March 2021. The rent was $2,750 a month, but in the pandemic market it quickly rose to $3,200. The time had come for a new space — and with Ms. Chen expecting their first child, they would need more of it.

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Mr. Clever, 31, is a robotics engineer who grew up in St. Louis, where grand Italianate and Second Empire homes once dominated the most fashionable neighborhoods, and he had always had a fondness for Brooklyn and its classic brownstones. “I have very specific tastes, and I wanted a house built between 1870 and 1900,” he said.

While he had his eye on architectural details, as well as space for a rental tenant or two, Ms. Chen, 32, a translator and editor, had another goal in mind: finding a space that could hold the piano, which she had tracked down and intended to buy.

“We visited a lot of homes that had been cut up and felt so cramped inside,” Ms. Chen said. “We wanted a real brownstone.”

The couple were confident they could buy a two- or even three-family home and find renters to defray the mortgage payments. Earlier this year, they settled on a budget of about $1.5 million and hoped to find something that had outdoor space, was near the subway and Asian supermarkets, and was zoned for good schools. All the while, Ms. Chen had an eye on formal living rooms that could accommodate a grand piano.

Their son was due in September, so the clock was ticking. They started searching in Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant, near where they first met, but their broker, Arthur Hunt, an agent with Compass, encouraged them to cast a wider net. “The way they described their dream home, I felt there was very limited inventory,” Mr. Hunt said. “I thought it would be interesting for us to explore other neighborhoods as well.”

Among the properties they considered:

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