Award-winning Merz residence on Willow Place sells for $10.6M

November 21, 2024 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

The building located at the corner of Willow and State streets, once the office of Merz Architects and a residence for the Merz family, has been sold for $10.6 million. Photo: Brooklyn Eagle File

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BROOKLYN HEIGHTS — A HOME AT 48 Willow Place in Brooklyn Heights, designed by famous Brooklyn architects Joseph and Mary Merz, has been sold for $10.6 million, broker Sarah Shuken of The Corcoran Group confirmed to the Brooklyn Eagle on Thursday. Mary Merz had been one of two woman students at Pratt Institute in Clinton Hill when she enrolled in 1946; it was there that she met her husband, who would be her partner in future architectural projects, most notably the one in Willowtown, according to a 2015 obituary published by the Brooklyn Heights Press. In 1963, with a loan from Mary’s father, the Merzes purchased four empty lots at the State Street end of Willow Place. The couple became Merz Architects, designing and building three prize-winning townhouses with backyard gardens that fit two single-lot homes and a double-lot unit. The AIA Guide to New York City hailed the project for revitalizing the area. Then, in 1969, the group of three houses won the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects Award for sensitivity to neighborhood scale and excellence in design. The double-lot home, the Leonard Garment House at 40 Willow Place, was awarded the Architectural Record Award of Excellence for House Design.

Merz Architects designed that building for then-White House Counsel Leonard Garment — a Brooklyn native and a liberal Democrat who worked for President Richard Nixon. Joseph Merz, who died in 2020, was memorialized in a Brooklyn Eagle story later that year.

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