A 1915 Crown Heights House That's Only On Its Third Owners

After living all over the world, Thomas Gensemer and Gabe Brotman settled down in a Brooklyn place with “a bit of an English feel to it.”

- WENDY GOODMAN

The Kitchen

The eat-in kitchen has a family vibe. The wallpaper is by House of Hackney. A Noguchi lantern hangs above the vintage farm table, and Room & Board pendants illuminate the kitchen island.

THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I’ve not had furniture in storage in 20 years,” says Thomas Gensemer, a globe-trotting adman who met his peripatetic match in Gabe Brotman, then an executive at Politico. “Between the two of us, we’ve had places in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, London, and Brussels,” says Brotman. And in the process, “we just collect too much stuff.” By 2018, they knew they had to make a home together in the same city, and Gensemer’s Brooklyn Heights one-bedroom wasn’t going to be big enough for the two of them, not to mention the family they are planning to start.

They had been looking at houses in Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant when a listing caught their eye. “Embarrassingly,” Gensemer recalls, “it was literally 3 a.m., coming home from a Brooklyn warehouse dance party, and Gabe was on Zillow on his phone and found a 9 a.m. Sunday open house.” Bleary-eyed, they walked in and made an offer immediately. It was just what they had hoped to find.

“It needed a lot of work,” Gensemer says. “But we could see the original intent.”