A Doll’s House: Inside the Home of Kathy Libraty, Frank Hechenberger, and Elisa Lovelie
At the end of a street lined with late Victorian-era mansions sits a yellow-and-green house with a turret. Stand in front of it and it’s hard not to feel as if you’ve taken one of Alice’s magic shrinking pills and are about to step inside a dollhouse and become part of a perfect miniature world made real.
The fantastical feeling is hard to shake even after entering the home of artist and antique doll dealer Kathy Libraty, contractor and antiquarian Frank Hechenberger, and their daughter, musician and college student Elisa Lovelie. The family has been living in the 1906 house for just eight years, but its meticulous restoration, along with the antique furnishings that Libraty and Hechenberger have spent decades collecting, give the first impression that the house has been preserved in amber for the last century. The home—also known as the William and Lulu Norwood House—was the final addition on the stretch of Buckingham Road in the architecturally rich part of Brooklyn known as Prospect Park South. Built in an Italian Villa style with a Colonial Revival foundation, the house balances its inherent stateliness with a touch of whimsy, easily seen in the delicate finials and splayed lintels. It’s the kind of house you assume has been in the same family for generations, the kind of house that never changes hands because it’s part of a family’s legacy.
So, how then, did Libraty and Hechenberger wind up here? “I got the home without a realtor,” Libraty says with a laugh, “and we sold our other house on Craigslist.” That other house was a Victorian just a few blocks away in Ditmas Park, and when they realized they needed more space, Libraty first contemplated moving out of Brooklyn before realizing that their favorite architectural era—and the one that best suited their antique collection—was most commonly found exactly where they already lived. “We looked it up and found out that the highest concentration of Victorian homes is right here in the Ditmas Park area,” Lovelie says. And luckily, the perfect house in both size and style was waiting for them—and for the Bradbury & Bradbury wallpaper with which Libraty has graced the walls; the spectacular, shimmering chandeliers that now hang from the ceilings; the antique Majolica stone tiles brought back from France (“[the French] have had them for 150 years and are tired of looking at them; they want Formica floors”); and, of course, the dolls.