Photographs Courtesy of the Brokers
If You Really Want a Nineteenth-Century Townhouse If you have always coveted a townhouse, but don’t have a few million to spare, you can content yourself with a little slice of the dream, like this parlor-floor one-bedroom on the Upper West Side that’s full of lovely period details (if only 550 square feet). Or head northward to Ottawa, where you can have a Victorian rowhouse all to yourself for nearly the same price. It’s a few blocks from the Governor General’s mansion in New Edinburgh, a historic enclave that once housed workers for the lumber companies that dominated the city, and has three bedrooms, two baths, and a garden. Photo: Courtesy of the Brokers
If You Must Live Between a Park and a River This Upper East Side one-bedroom is in a co-op that’s more flexible than most”it’s open to pied-à-terre types and allows guarantors. But if you want to flee New York without sacrificing world-class urban luxury, consider the Oud Zuid borough of Amsterdam. It’s flush with parks (including the grand Vondelpark) and markets (like the famous Albert Cuyp) and home to Museum Square. This renovated house has two large bedrooms and two kinderkamers (children’s rooms) and is in a younger, trendier area of Oud Zuid known as De Pijp. Photo: Courtesy of the Brokers
If Pedigree Is Everything John Jacob Astor, the fur trader who wound up owning much of Manhattan, built this five-bedroom, six-bath townhouse in the early 1800s, and it retains its elegant exterior but has had a full update inside. It’s an even trade for an entirely different kind of aristocratic hideaway: Lilly Pulitzer’s estate in Palm Beach, which is only slightly less pink and green than you’d imagine. Its designers were, according to the designer’s daughter and agent Liza Pulitzer, specifically directed to evoke the lush gardens surrounding the house, a nod to the foliage-heavy prints that made her famous. Photo: Courtesy of the Brokers
