I’ve actually been inside the house. The house that authors Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss are buying for $6.75 million. It was on the Park Slope House Tour years and years ago. As everyone knows, those house tours are a form of real estate porn. You get to be a voyeur, to see what it looks like inside those houses you walk by day after day. Fantasies abound as you pass. Ah the envy, the longing, the sense that such wonderful lives are lived beyond the stoops of those brownstone and limestone glories.

It’s a nice house the house they’re buying. And not only that: the yard goes from Second Street all the way to Third Street. That’s right. It includes the empty lot you pass when you’re walking to Prospect Park on Third Street (close to PPW). The current owners keep their SUV in the vacant garden lot and they have a fancy wood playground set there. Every time we walk by, my daughter invariably says:  "I really, really want to try that playground one day. There’s no-one ever in there."  And then I have to explain that it is not a public playground but a private yard for a boy and a girl who never use their fantastic playground equipment.

The thought just baffles my daughter’s mind. I figure they’re at their Hamptons beach house most weekends so they just don’t have the time to use that glorioius playground that my daughter wants to try.

The house on Second Street that the Foer-Krauss’ are buying is super deluxe; a to-die for brownstone. The decor, however, is ugly, ugly ugly. Overdone wall treatments, expensive appliances, bad art. Way too much money combined with  way too little taste. That was my feeling, anyway. But the house has what you call great bones. Really fantastic bones, I would say and lots of historic detail. I would be MORE than happy to live there. And so would you.

But that yard. It’s a yard where a house might be. It is so super duper luxurious to have all that space. In Brooklyn. What a garden it could be. What flowers. Trees.

I’m kind of excited about Jonathan and Nicole moving there. I bet they’re going to do wonderful things to that house; big, comfortable writing rooms, a  library or two with shabby chic sofas, no doubt. A voluptuous living room, an inviting kitchen with a view of their gigantic backyard. 

I’m glad that place is going to a couple of talented writers – maybe they’ll even use their gigundo backyard. It’ll be great for daydreaming, star gazing the Brooklyn sky, and hours and hours spent reading on a hammock.

That’s what I would do.

*Monday night Hugh Crawford went out and shot those pictures of Jonathan and Nicole’s backyard-to-be from Third Street. This and all the Postcard from the Slope pictures are by Hugh Crawford in case anyone was wondering.