Swan House: A Restored 1920s Waterfront Bungalow on Jamaica Bay

There are not many places in New York City where you can step outside with a cup of coffee, watch great blue herons work the shoreline, launch a kayak from your own backyard, make pottery in a sprawling studio downstairs—and still be in Manhattan in 45 minutes.

Welcome to Swan House, a restored 1920s waterfront bungalow tucked along the edge of Jamaica Bay in Broad Channel, one of the best lots in New York City’s most unusual and tightly held waterfront communities.

Set behind a fully enclosed 75 × 100 property with approximately 75 feet of direct waterfront, Swan House feels more like a private compound than a typical New York City home. Inside the gates are gardens, mature trees, a koi pond, a hot and cold outdoor shower, spaces for making and entertaining, and an ever-changing panorama of water, sky, wildlife and the Manhattan skyline.

But what makes Swan House particularly special is that beneath all of that waterfront beauty, it remains very much an old house.

Moved by barge in the 1920’s to Broadchannel from Ruffle Bar Island, the FEMA-approved elevated living level retains original hardwood floors, 1920s doors and slip-shade light fixtures, a wood-burning fireplace, a cedar-lined bedroom and a widow’s walk above the roof. One of its most memorable surviving features is an original Prohibition-era hatch and interior stair connecting the Artist Studio to the house above—a wonderfully strange remnant of the building’s past.

According to the history passed down with the property, the house itself was moved to this site from another island in Jamaica Bay during the early part of the 20th century. During later restoration work, old butcher knives bearing the name of an early owner were discovered hidden inside an upstairs wall. Like many homes in Broad Channel, Swan House has accumulated the kind of stories that could only belong to a house built on an island in New York Harbor.

The house was raised decades ago and has since been thoughtfully restored and updated for its next century.

Upstairs, the three-bedroom, one-bath home is compact in the way a true bungalow should be, but nearly every room is connected visually to the landscape outside. The custom kitchen overlooks Jamaica Bay through a broad bank of windows, turning cooking, morning coffee and dinner with friends into a waterfront experience. Original woodwork and historic details remain alongside the fully updated and renovated kitchen and bath, giving the interior a collected, relaxed character rather than the feeling of a newly built house.

This is a house for sandy feet.

Doors stay open. Swimsuits dry outside. Wine is poured on the deck. The tide comes and goes. Swans stop by daily for a snack, egrets and great blue herons stalk the shallows, and ospreys circle overhead. As evening arrives, the sky changes behind Manhattan across the bay.

The grounds have been developed with the same informal spirit. Mature plantings of Russian sage, salt cedar, fig trees, 3-story Yew trees and a living hedge, surround a hot-and-cold outdoor shower entwined with honeysuckle and clematis. There is a koi pond, raised vegetable garden, pollinator and wildflower gardens, naturalized yard and extraordinary mature yews that have been part of the property for generations.

At the water’s edge, the approximately 75 feet of direct Jamaica Bay frontage includes a recently refaced bulkhead, swim stairs and four boat davits, creating a property genuinely connected to the bay rather than simply overlooking it.

And then there is the studio.

The enclosed ground level gives Swan House something extraordinarily difficult to find in New York City: real working space.

Currently used as a photography and pottery studio, the approximately 44 × 16-foot open room offers roughly 725 square feet of heated and insulated enclosed space, with a concrete floor and sliding glass doors facing the water. It is intentionally a working space—the place for clay, canvases, equipment, prototypes, bicycles, kayaks and the messy side of making things.

For an artist, designer, photographer, ceramicist, collector, maker or entrepreneur who has spent years trying to squeeze a serious practice into a spare bedroom or rented studio, the possibility here is unusual.

Altogether, the property offers more than 2,000 square feet of enclosed space between the elevated residence and lower-level studio.

Swan House has also received substantial infrastructure and restoration work, including a new shingle roof and flat roof, nearly all-new electrical service and wiring, new plumbing, a new boiler and oil tank, spray-foam insulation, rebuilt and skim-coated walls, restored original elements, a new custom kitchen and a new bathroom with handmade zellige tile and an antique vanity. Exterior drainage improvements have also been completed, and the street itself was raised as part of neighborhood resiliency work.

Perhaps the greatest luxury here, however, is the combination of things that rarely coexist.

This is an old bungalow with a history.

It is a waterfront house with direct access to Jamaica Bay.

It is a private, fully enclosed 7,500-square-foot property inside New York City.

It is a home with a substantial dedicated artist’s studio.

And it remains connected to the rest of the city, on the A train approximately 45 minutes from Manhattan and the Rockaway NYC Ferry only eight minutes away.

Swan House is not a polished Hamptons beach house transported to Queens, nor was it intended to be. It is something more idiosyncratic: an old New York waterfront bungalow that has been restored without erasing the eccentricities that make it worth preserving.

A place to live, make things, garden, swim, kayak, entertain, watch storms roll across the bay and see Manhattan glowing on the horizon.

A little piece of old New York, still sitting at the water’s edge. Swanhousenyc.com