If you are simultaneously a zen meditation master and you also have kids, this is the house for you. I don't think this person exists. This house is honestly so beautifully and wonderfully designed while also being definitively odd in places. Let's get into it.

We have to talk about the garage first

I mentioned that I like to start with the view of the front of the house, and for $5.8M this one is perfectly well-kept. But it has a garage and that sort of breaks my brain. The property was once a carriage house so I get why it's there logically. I guess I'm not quite sure that I would dedicate that much above-ground square footage in prime Brooklyn to the automobile. That's what McMansions in the suburbs are for.

If you can get over the altar to the American automobile at the front door, you are really going to be blown away by the interior of this place though.

The interior is a small miracle

I don't know who did the staging for this house but wow. It looks like someone with incredibly obsessive taste that leans mid-century selected every piece in here. I am both intimidated but also impressed because this is not cookie cutter staging.

Whatever your furniture style, it is pretty spectacularly designed with beautiful woodwork and exposed beams throughout, and restored brick walls lending the whole house a warmth that sometimes gets lost in the repetitive marble kitchen plus custom millwork living room.

It's got a big living room, dining room, kitchen open floor plan. And the kitchen has pressed tin ceilings and a wood-burning pizza oven!?!

The kitchen has a pizza oven. A pizza oven.

I am flabbergasted and inspired. Also, my children would destroy the furniture and give the cherry floors a fine patina of scratches inside of 1 hour.

Let's go upstairs anyway.

Upstairs: minimalism (but about that closet)

The primary bedroom is minimalist with trees outside the window from the backyard (trust me, we will get there). There is an enormous (and I mean enormous) closet. I am not sure how having this minimalist design vibe meshes with the need for a closet that could fit Imelda Marcos's shoe collection, but here we are.

The "kids' rooms"

OK the "kids' rooms," let's talk. Also beautiful and minimalist. One is full-sized and the other is flirting with large closet territory, but it can fit an XL twin bed and it has a closet and a window so I'm letting it pass.

My overwhelming feeling in looking at these rooms is that either the stager has never interacted with kids in their entire life, or they have unlocked some boss level of parenting. The one where they throw away every toy that their children have ever been gifted.

The den, briefly, and then the real reason you're here

Finally we can descend to the family room/den, which sits on the ground floor behind the garage (see, it's weird to say that). I really can't talk about the den that much because the real thing you need to know about this house is that there is a full-on guest house in the backyard across a lovely stone courtyard.

Guest house.

It is Japanese bathhouse-themed with a wooden tub, a steam room, and a large bedroom with more exposed wood beams and some sort of wood floor the name for which is too fancy for me to know.

If your jaw is not on the floor, then maybe you should buy this place. It's almost painfully beautiful in its design. There is so much potential. I just can't get over the garage. It's like this house's Achilles heel.

What I'd want to check on before buying

• The true condition of the mechanicals. With a house this designed, it's easy to miss that the HVAC, hot water, and electrical were probably updated at different moments and may or may not all be current.
• The guest house's certificate of occupancy. A full second structure on the lot must be legally habitable. Triple-check.
• How the pizza oven vents. Wood-burning ovens in residential kitchens are delightful and also a lot of work to operate safely and maintain.
• Property tax assessment. Carriage-house conversions in this tier can surprise people.
• Sunlight in the den. Ground-floor-behind-a-garage rooms are often darker than photos suggest.