Sir Peter Warren is a royal British naval officer who, by 1744, had purchased a 300-acre farm in the modern-day Greenwich Village. His land stretched from the Hudson River to the Bowery and from Charles Street to West 21st Street.

He and his wife Susannah De Lancey lived in a mansion on what is now the block bound by Bleecker, Charles, West 4th, and Perry Street. He built his home, Warren House (aka La Manse), in 1741, on the same corner block and lot where the subject property stands today. His mansion, shown in the image above, is what is now known as La Maison Pierre.

Although most of the 300-acre Warren farm was divided up and sold off for development by the early to mid-nineteenth century, this block was the only one in the entire Village to remain rural well into the 1860s. The Warren farmhouse survived on this site, albeit in altered form, and was last owned by Abraham Van Ness.During the years of van Nest’s ownership, development encroached closer until the only undeveloped part of the former Warren estate was the house itself. After Van Ness’s death in 1864, this last remaining piece of Village farmland and the Van Ness farmhouse located on the corner of Charles and Bleecker Street were sold off for row house development.

Built in 1868 on the exact block and lot of La Manse and in the French Second Empire’s style, today sits this extraordinary and iconic double-wide townhouse. Commissioned in 1868 by the coal magnate Henry E.C. Kugeler, architect Henry Engelbert designed the trio of houses at the intersection of Charles and Bleecker streets. Each of these houses on Bleecker was designed for three families, above the stores, while Henry Kugeler occupied the house at 85 Charles Street.

At the time, the sale of the twin townhouses on Bleecker Street was concluded for $22,000, tenfold the price of any single-family house on the block, which was the most expensive in the Village, as it continues to be today.

In the 1980s, Pierre Le Vec and Pierre Moulin installed french casement windows at 367-369 Bleecker Street and renamed the building La Maison Pierre, as it is known today. In 2004, Beck Street Capital bought La Maison Pierre and converted and sold the townhouse floors into 3 residential condos per building while continuing to lease to the Pierres the shop. In 2010, they sold off the retail condo with Burberry in place as the tenant. At the time, the sale was the third-highest price per sq. ft. retail transaction in the United States’ history, achieving approx $6,700 per sq. ft.