Elizabeth Stribling, the grand dame of the high-end residential market, has doubled down at One Brooklyn Bridge Park, having purchased a studio apartment that she plans to use as guest quarters for her current home in the Brooklyn Heights waterfront conversion.
Stribling paid $534,582 for a 589-square-foot studio at 360 Furman Street, city records show. The founder of the tony residential brokerage Stribling & Associates plans to maintain the apartment for overseas guests and visitors, she told The Real Deal.
“I was a student of English literature in college,” Stribling said when reached on holiday in the French Riviera, “and it’s nice, as Virgina Woolf would say, to have ‘a room of one’s own.’”
The asking price of the unit – listed by MNS Real Estate on behalf of the developer, Robert Levine — was $570,000, according to StreetEasy. Stribling handled the purchase directly.
“You know very well I can represent myself,” she said.
Stribling and her husband live in a 12th-floor, 3,442-square-foot unit which she bought in 2009 for $6.32 million. At the time, the Brooklyn move surprised many real estate insiders who never expected her to leave the haute confines of the Upper East Side. But it coincided with her firm’s recent efforts to revamp its buttoned-up image and increase its appeal outside its traditional clientele of well-heeled Manhattanites, as The Real Deal reported.
Indeed, Stribling & Associates is increasingly bullish on Brooklyn, having opened a Boerum Hill office near the Barclays Center in May.
Levine’s RAL Companies & Affiliates began marketing the 14-story, 449-unit condo – formerly a Jehovah’s Witness printing plant – in early 2007, but had trouble selling units and leasing the retail space once the downturn began.
“I’m just crazy about the building and the service is superb,” Stribling said. “We have a lot of friends who come down from Europe or elsewhere, and it’s always nice if you get your own quarters and don’t have to bump.”