I’m a believer: Developer Marshall Sohne bets on Red Hook with Dikeman Street ‘Passivhaus’

Eye On Real Estate

January 16, 2014 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle

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Red Hook’s current crop of home builders includes Marshall Sohne, a developer who’s been busy of late in the nearby Columbia Waterfront District.

He’s at work on a four-story single-family house at 61 Dikeman St. – a site an LLC of his bought for $500,000 five days before Hurricane Sandy struck, city records indicate. Regrets, he’s had a few, but then again, too few to mention.

“I only regret listening to the naysayers and not being more aggressive,” said Sohne. “I have to say going around the neighborhood shortly after Sandy threw me off. It was a bit depressing and at times sad. But I see it coming back stronger and better.

“I think this time around the naysayers will be shown to be totally wrong,” he said. “My bet is on Red Hook.”

He hired the designer of the Botero Library in Medellin, Colombia, Orlando Garcia, as the Dikeman Street home’s design architect.

The architect of record for the house – which will be raised so all the livable space and utilities and mechanicals will be above the neighborhood’s new FEMA flood levels – is Fractal Architecture.

It will be a “Passivhaus” – a design that uses very little energy.

“I fell in love with the northern light that would fall upon this site and felt we could build something very special that would add to this blossoming neighborhood,” said Sohne, who’s not sure whether he’ll put the finished house up for sale or live in it himself.”