One of Brooklyn’s first boutique hotels, Hotel Williamsburg, opened at 160 North 12th Street this week, the Brooklyn Paper reported.

Rooms at the 64-room, eight-story hotel, will start at $295 a night, the paper said, with the most luxurious room costing $3,500 a night.

The hotel, by Minneapolis-based hoteliers Jim and Ben Graves, has a cocktail lounge, a ground-floor restaurant and outdoor courtyard swimming pool. Its rooftop bar will be serving drinks until 4:00 a.m. every night.

Next spring, the hotel will get some competition as Dumbo developers, the Walentas father and son team open their own 73-room boutique hotel close by, at North 11th Street and Wythe Avenue — but William thinks the personal touch and the family’s Midwestern hospitality may keep the guests coming to Hotel Williamsburg. [more]

Karen Heyman and Alan Heyman, Sotheby’s International Realty

From the July issue: The business of selling Brooklyn real estate has changed drastically in recent years. When Brooklyn native Karen Heyman first started selling Dumbo lofts in the 1990s, Manhattan residents refused to take the subway there. “I used to have to send my driver over the bridge to pick people up,” recalled Heyman, now a senior vice president at Sotheby’s International Realty. Today, “those same people are now on their third or fourth Dumbo apartment.” Brooklyn brokers have seen their business (and wallets) expand exponentially over the past decade, as a trickle, and then a flood, of resettling Manhattanites ventured across the East River. In particular, agents have benefited hugely from the condo boom of the mid-2000s, which greatly upped Brooklyn sales prices (downturn notwithstanding). [more]

The Clocktower triplex at 1 Main Street in Dumbo

After a nine-month hiatus from the market, David Walentas’ Clocktower building triplex in Dumbo is coming back online with a slashed asking price and a new set of brokers. According to the Post, Walentas has tapped the Kleier klan, of “Selling New York” fame, to market the 7,000-square-foot pad for $23.5 million. Sabrina Kleier Morgenstern, one-third of the Gumley Haft Kleier trio that also includes her mother, Michele Kleier, and sister, Samantha Kleier Forbes, confirmed to the The Real Deal that her family is putting the listing on the market later today and plans to hold a launch party next month to spread the word. The 1 Main Street condominium, which originally hit the market for $25 million in 2009, is still potentially Brooklyn’s priciest ever by a landslide, even after the price chop. [more]

The City Council
is expected to vote tomorrow on Jed and David Walentas’ Dock Street
project in Dumbo, a 17-story residential building near the Brooklyn
Bridge that City Council member David Yassky says is too tall. Another
Council member, Letitia James, who is an opponent of the Atlantic Yards
project, has supported the Dock Street project because it will also
house a school. City Council speaker Christine Quinn is reportedly
supporting the project.