25 Cranberry Street is one of Brooklyn’s most cartoonishly quaint homes — a squat, wood-frame house covered in raw-wood shingles that peeks up through two dormer windows at its brick and brownstone neighbors in Brooklyn Heights. It shows up on an 1829 map as the home of “Mrs. Bruce,” but it may be older; the broker now listing it for $4.9 million claims it was built in 1790. Inside, the rooms look as old as the exterior, but in an open, unfussily modern way, with wide, wooden floorboards from old growth trees and patchy plaster walls. “I like to think of the young women in their 1840s gowns going up the stairs,” says owner Elisabeth Cunnick, who took pains to protect No. 25 from development as a brand-new four-story brick home rose on an empty lot next door. “I made a promise to the house that if I held on long enough, there would be enough people able to see the house for the beauty it has and not see a gut renovation.”
If Cunnick sounds like she’s timing the sale of an artwork, it might be because she comes from that world. In 1995, she and her ex, the gallerist Peter Freeman, sold a single print (an Andy Warhol of Chairman Mao) to come up with the down payment on the $500,000 house. At the time, she was running A/D Gallery, which specialized in selling utilitarian objects made by artists: matte-black bowls by James Turrell, lamps by Richard Tuttle, and glass vases by Jennifer Bartlett. The wares veered toward minimalism: Cunnick was the sole New York dealer of Donald Judd furniture at the time. Her renovation didn’t bring in Duncan Phyfe chairs and period-appropriate wallpaper, either, but instead pared the home back to its raw materials and simple forms.