Will $1 Million Buy a Brownstone in Bay Ridge? One Family Surveyed Their Options in South Brooklyn

Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, was the obvious place for Marie and Francisco Brugueras to settle. That’s where Mrs. Brugueras — then Marie Shaub — lived with her family after immigrating from Russia as a teenager.

She and Mr. Brugueras, who is from Puerto Rico, met at business school at the University of Chicago. They lived in Manhattan for 10 years, then returned to Bay Ridge when they were planning to have children, to be near Mrs. Brugueras’s mother.

The couple lived in a two-bedroom rental with their twins, Nicolai and Vera, now 8. There was no place to store the double stroller, which they would haul up to the third floor. And their need for space only grew when they learned they were having a third child, Maia, now 7. So they bought and renovated a detached, two-story Bay Ridge house, with a shared driveway and a garage they used for storage.

But as the children grew, the house seemed to shrink. The family struggled with closet space. The front door opened to a tiny vestibule off the kitchen, and “bigger and bigger coats were populating our kitchen” in the winter, Mrs. Brugueras said. “All of the stuff the kids take off ends up in the kitchen, and I spend an inordinate amount of time moving it.”

The couple, now in their early 40s, dreamed of a house with separate bedrooms for the children, a spot for a baby grand piano and a home office for Mr. Brugueras, who works in finance.

“We love historical properties,” Mrs. Brugueras said, although the kind of brownstone they longed for, with original details, had always been out of their price range.

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“In Bay Ridge, brownstones are one-offs and are surrounded by architecture that is much later,” she said. “Bay Ridge is not brownstone Brooklyn by any means. It has a lot of free-standing homes and was developed a lot in the ’30s.”

One day, browsing Zillow, Mrs. Brugueras found a lovely brownstone for sale, which sparked the hunt for a bigger home. Their budget was around $1 million.

Most of the brownstones they saw were attached, and few had driveways. But the couple found themselves relying less on their car, and the children no longer needed car seats, so they asked themselves whether they could cope with street parking. They decided they could.

They also didn’t care about yards, most of which seemed to be filled with mosquitos and noise from the neighbors.

Among their options:

Find out what happened next by answering these two questions: