Capote’s Willow Street House

“I live in Brooklyn. By choice…” Truman Capote lived in 70 Willow Street in Brooklyn and penned A House on the Heights while in residence there. From The Guardian:

The Brooklyn Heights home where Capote lived in the 1950s and 1960s - a five-storey, 11-bedroom townhouse built in 1839 - went on sale with Sotheby's International Realty yesterday for the first time in 70 years. Capote wrote his 1959 essay about Brooklyn, A House On the Heights, while living in the property, describing the splendour of its "beautiful staircase floating upward in white, swan-simple curves to a skylight of sunny amber-gold glass", its walls "thick as a buffalo, immune to the mightiest cold, the meanest heat" and its "porch canopied, completely submerged, as though under a lake of leaves, by an ancient but admirably vigorous vine weighty with grapelike bunches of wisteria".Capote rented the Willow Street house from the stage designer Oliver Smith, living in two basement rooms. However, George Plimpton writes in his introduction to A House on the Heights: "when friends came to call, he often took them on a tour of the entire house (when Smith was not at home) and said it was his house, all his, and that he had restored and decorated every room ... One of them (which Truman does not mention) contained Smith's mother's favourite furniture - old beaded lampshades, rocking chairs - indeed, a room whose decor must have given Truman pause to explain to his friends on his tours."The author describes in A House On the Heights how, after a run of Martinis on the porch of the house with Smith, he eventually convinced his friend to rent him a few rooms in the property. "It got to be quite late, he began to see my point: yes, twenty-eight rooms were rather a lot; and yes, it seems only fair that I should have some of them." For more information about this one-of-a-kind house, now available for the first time in 70 years, click here.