The five-story, two-family modern townhouse made of all-white stucco fully unveiled itself earlier this year in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Erected on a corner lot in a neighborhood dominated by brownstones and prewar buildings, it’s impossible to miss — made even more striking by entry doors painted traffic cone orange. The house hit the market in March with an eye-watering price tag of $5.25 million to match the eye-catching design.
That, residents say, made it a target. And sometime in May, the building got tagged — not with traditional spray-painted graffiti, but with a small museum-style plaque that spoke to a much larger issue.
“New York City
Housing Crisis, 2025
New apartments, full furnished, warmly lit, no inhabitants
This piece asks us to consider the tension between NYC’s historically low apartment vacancy rate (1.6%) and the price of this vacant duplex ($5.25m).”
The New York Times could not locate the identity of the unauthorized mystery curator. Sometime between Sunday afternoon and Monday afternoon, the plaque was removed.
The award-winning Swiss architect Inès Lamunière, who designed the house, and Matthias Müller, the owner of the Brooklyn-based firm MuNYC Architecture, did not respond to requests for comment. Lucy Perry, the listing agent, also did not respond to requests for comment.