________________________________________________________________________________________________ Historic Homes
In 2006, when I priced my first brownstone renovation in Park Slope, Brooklyn, I had no idea what I was really getting into. The house sat on a corner lot in a landmark district, a classic 19th-century brownstone that had seen better days. At the time, I had just started my own construction company. My background in construction gave me confidence, but nothing fully prepares you for opening the walls of a 100-year-old townhouse for the first time.
Behind the plaster we found structural surprises, improvised repairs from decades past, and layers of history that couldn’ t simply be ripped out and replaced. What started as‘ just another job’ quickly became something else: a lesson in preservation, craftsmanship, and responsibility. That first project changed everything. Over the next decade, the once-neglected building became one of the most recognizable homes in the neighborhood, eventually appearing on the television series Billions, which first aired on Showtime and now streams across multiple platforms. Seeing a brownstone we painstakingly revived show up on screen was surreal, but more importantly, it confirmed something deeper:
modernhb. com 19