Feature

How Far Would You Go for a Piece of Real Estate?

On April 27, Kirchner and Fabien flew to Madrid, rented a car, drove to Oviedo, and then went on to Pola de Allande. They stopped at a café, and Fabien called Isabel from a pay phone. From three feet away Kirchner could hear “¿Qué? ¿Qué? ¿Qué?” through the receiver. Isabel met them there and brought them to her place; then they convoyed to the Barrero ancestral home.

Kirchner and Fabien entered the old stone house through the kitchen. Only two of José’s siblings were there, the brothers Manuel and Constantino. Manuel, the oldest brother, was frail and emotional. Kirchner and Fabien were told not to upset him by mentioning José; he stayed in the kitchen. But Constantino and his wife, Valentina, greeted them in the living room, along with not one but two nephews with the name José.

No one spoke English, so Kirchner relied on Fabien to field the questions. The chief inquisitor was not Constantino but Valentina. “She was intimidating,” Kirchner says. “You could tell she wore the pants.” Fabien made the case: All Kirchner was looking for was a home, and he was the perfect person to turn José’s building into something to be proud of.

Eventually there was some laughter. Valentina gave her guests a tour, and showed them some things once owned by the late José. When Kirchner and Fabien left, Kirchner had no idea what had been said.

“You cannot believe,” Fabien told him. “There was so much going on. Just know that you made a good impression. They want you to buy the house. But you have to go through María.”

Fabien and Kirchner drove through the night to Barcelona. Kirchner knew the price would go up; he just needed it not to go up to market value. For all that effort, he told himself, for four months’ work, I deserve a discount. In Barcelona, María was expecting them. They had a long dinner. Kirchner learned that visiting her family had made all the difference. María had adopted a tough bargaining stance only because she felt she owed it to her family to seek the best possible deal. In fact, she didn’t really want the pressure of starting from scratch and looking for buyers. Kirchner’s visit to the family had convinced them that his intentions were genuine, she told him. They agreed she’d come to New York and they’d get the deal done.

Besides, as María told him with a seductive smile and disturbing certainty, “You’ll pay more.”

The following week, on May 3, 2003, María and her husband visited the Brooklyn building that her uncle and aunt had left behind five years before. Kirchner was their guide. After a twenty-minute tour of the place—“You have a lot of work to do,” María said—the trio proceeded to the River Café, where, in the final minutes of a marathon lunch, they agreed on a purchase price of $400,000.

The contract took until November 2003 to be signed—Kirchner’s lawyer told him he’d never seen such a complicated title report—and Kirchner didn’t get financing until last May. The money came from the unlikeliest place: another ex-boyfriend of Courtney’s. Ian Clark is a D.J. who had been looking to buy in Brooklyn for some time. “He had the resources, but didn’t have the energy or the time,” says Courtney. “And I knew that Dave was pulling his hair out. They were perfect counterparts.”

Kirchner and Clark now own the building together. Clark secured financing for the initial $500,000 mortgage—the purchase, plus soft costs, like architect fees and the costs of a condo conversion—plus additional construction loans totaling about $420,000 for renovations. Under the terms of their agreement, Kirchner will buy the top-floor condo back from Clark after the renovations are done (Kirchner will have to get his own mortgage for his own apartment); Clark will own the second-floor apartment, and the two will each own half of the ground-floor store, which will be a wine shop run by another friend.

Kirchner’s dream may have been downsized somewhat, but the renovations are his new white whale. Work started in July of last year and was supposed to end in December. Now it’s looking like March. For a time, the architect left the job because Kirchner was making too many changes. He’s added a fourth-story loft level to his apartment; he’s redesigned the kitchen four times (the latest plan includes two different sinks); he bought a Duravit-designed toilet bowl, shaped in the letter D, from eBay; and yes, there will be a hot tub. In January, the general contractor died, leaving Kirchner personally supervising five subcontractors.

When all is said and done, Kirchner and Clark expect to sink $1 million into the building, renovations included. The way the neighborhood is booming, they think they could sell the finished building in a few years for as much as $1.5 million.

Kirchner has a snapshot of him and Fabien from their adventure in Pola de Allande, standing in front of windmills. It took until they got home for someone to point out that Kirchner was Don Quixote. The comparison should have made him laugh, but it unsettled him. Was the dream really worth it?

“I have mixed feelings,” Kirchner says. “The important thing is, I’m in. And I did grow up, but not in the way I thought I would. Now I think about the noise from the buses going by and whether that affects the value of my property. I think about how there are no trash cans on my block and how that might affect what I can charge for rent on the store, and who to talk to on the community board about it. The first part was something of a fairy tale. This is about everyday battles.”

The dividing line between the two, he says, “was the day I actually owned the thing.”