WSJ News Exclusive | They Hated Their Brooklyn Townhouse. Now They Wouldn’t Dream of Calling It ‘Ugly.’

In 2018, architect Pierre-Henri Hoppenot, who was born in France but grew up in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and his wife, tech entrepreneur Daphne Earp Hoppenot, who grew up in Washington, D.C., paid $2.43 million for a house they hated. The couple planned to raise bilingual children, which had led them to Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, the one-time Italian immigrant neighborhood that now has a large French-speaking population. But there was only one house in Carroll Gardens listed for under $3 million. It had been slapped together in 1941 among a row of older, more substantial buildings. Its brick facade was a tacky, multicolored mess with windows arranged asymmetrically. And the cheap aluminum awning added no charm to the stoopless entry. 

For a long time after they bought it, “When friends came over we would tell them to look for the ugly house and they knew which one immediately,” says Daphne.