Barclay On Beacon

Lived in this building for a couple years, the building itself is located in a great location close to Coolidge Corner, my apartment was huge (i lived in a 2 bed/​2 bath) overlooking Beacon st. I have to say my experience in this building overall was very positive, never had any issues. Whenever something in the apartment needed to be fixed, the maintenance guys always resolved it in a very timely manner. The management in the building was always very friendly and professional towards me and always accommodated my requests. Parking is available which is a plus living in Brookline. I would recommend it to anyone looking to live in the area.

This is an incredibly poorly managed building — elevators are always going down and building constantly needs repairs
The absolute worst part about living here is the management in the building — they are utterly incompetent. It has taken several weeks for them to take care of water damage in my apartment, at which time they merely put a band-​aid on the damage.
They also just lost one of my packages — both the building management and concierge service Palladion refuse to take ownership of the loss. I’m so disappointed with the service and will certainly not be renewing my lease
I would highly recommend living somewhere else!

Not worth the overall cost here.
I have lived in the Barclay House for 2 years and it has gotten gradually worse the longer that I’ve lived here.
The building was built in the 1970s, so the infrastructure is OLD. This leads to many issues which I will highlight below:
The Heat and A/​C are controlled by the building as to when they are on or off. The AC gets turned off in Sept and doesn’t turn on again until May. That means that there will be hot days in the fall where you cannot get comfortable due to only Hot Air blowing out of your vents. Additionally, there will be many times in winter where they have to turn off the heat in order to do work on the aging pipes, this will immediately leave your apartment FREEZING.
There were several burst pipes this winter and many residents were displaced from their units, the rest of us had huge hole made into our walls to check where the leak was coming from. Instead of a cosmetically pleasing coverup, we got a piece of ply wood posted over the wall, really nice!
The elevators are CONSTANTLY out of services, so I’m often forced to walk up 10 flghts of stairs. Additionally, there are only 2 of them, so even when they work, they take forever to come, and when they open, they are usually full.
The building is VERY dog friendly, but many people don’t have well-​behaved pets. This leads to constant piss in the elevator when dogs are being taken out… the careless owners don’t even clean up after them and leave it for others to step in.
There is underground parking which is nice, but the parking is CONSTANTLY flooded due to being several floors underground. ITs cold in there, shit from the ceiling is constantly falling onto your car, and people who are visiting will park in your spot if you leave it unoccupied.
The boiler in the building is 50 years old and needs to be replaced, but the building refuses to do so. This leads to the hot water being out of services and the heat being shut off constantly so they can fix it. Often they will only leave a note under your door notifying you of this work THE MORNING OF so youll probably discover it on your own when you go to take a shower for work and the water temp is –50.
Yes, they claim to have a Gym and Pool, but both are for appearance more than function. The pool is open for only a couple months out of the year, and is only available when the lifeguard is on duty. There are only a few chairs and its usually full o little kids who cannot be controlled by their parents, screaming, splashing, and bothering any adult who has the courage to get in with them.
The gym consists of 2 treadmills, a stair masters, an incomplete set of dumbells, and an all-​in-​one type machine. I still go here, but often the 3 machines are occupied and you are SOL until you come back.
There is a laundry room which costs you $ 3 per load (including drying), but they are tiny and it takes me 4 loads to do my laundry, which is $ 12 every time. Additionally, these units often are out of order (as they are today) and the company that fixes them usually takes 5 days to come here and fix them. 5 Days without the ability to do Laundry when your are paying $ 3k a month???
That brings me to my next point. With the falling quality of the building, they had the audacity to raise my rent more than $ 200. I love the location, love that it is dog friendly, the maintenance staff (Jim & Lenny) and the front desk (Richard, Jared) are all great. The building itself leaves a lot to be desired and doesn’t seem to be getting any better, just more expensive.

Do yourself a favor and do not move into Barclay on Beacon. While it may charm you with a nice view and closeness to the T, the downsides are way too much.
First of all — the management is the most incompetent bunch I have ever seen. Everything is always a problem with them. Completely unresponsive and unwilling to solve anything.
Second, they allow smoking in the building. Who still does that??? The smell of cigarettes, cigars, and weed is constant. And it’s in YOUR apartment! It easily goes through ventilation system and spreads everywhere.
Next, windows. Oh, wow. The most drafty apartment I have ever been to. When it’s windy outside — it will be windy inside. And I’m not just saying slight breeze. It will be WINDY. Things have been blown off the windowsill on many occasions. In the winter you will be either hot or cold. No middle ground. The thermostats are far off the windows, so by the time the cold propagates to it — you will be frozen. But then the heat will kick in and by the time it propagates to the thermostat — you will be sweating. It’s a constant cycle of too hot then too cold then too hot and so on.
Finally, noise. The green line is especially loud, and you will hear it! No matter which floor you’re on. So, you will be waking up at 5 with the first T, and you will be woken up after midnight with the last one.
And a final kicker — they raise the rent 10%! I am not kidding — 10%. Spoke to tenants who have been there for more than a year — everyone said they do it yearly.
In summary, as I said in the beginning — do not move in.

I’ve lived here for the past 2 years, and am moving out at the end of June. I live on the 11^th floor in a 1-​bedroom. Here’s my take:
Pros:
On the Green T Line.
Short walk to Coolidge Corner and Washington Square (Trader Joe’s, Wholefoods, Stop n Shop)
Most food places deliver to this centrally located building.
Easy access to school (BC), and also probably to surrounding schools.
Covered parking ($ 200/​month).
Dog friendly (I didn’t have a dog, but pretty much everyone else in the building does.
Spacious living room and bedroom.
Cons:
Touts gym and pool… both are sorry excuses for what they claim to be.
Unresponsive management.
Tiny kitchen, little counter space, and crappy appliances.
Old water pipes – the water that comes out smells weird, and it’s DEFINITELY undrinkable out of the tap.
If you get locked out of your apartment outside of the hours of 9 to 5, there will be no one on hand to let you in. And then they will charge you $ 100 for it, too.
On-​site laundry room is gross, and they leave my clothes feeling grungy and dirty – not clean.
Apartment is very drafty in the winter, and it is very difficult to monitor the temperature. I sometimes have my heat up to 85 degrees, and it is STILL cold.
The building allows smokers, and this is particularly inconvenient because cigarette smoke wafts into my apartment constantly.
Along those lines… I’m fairly certain there is a pot dealer that lives in my building. The smell of pot is CONSTANT.
The worst was when a pipe exploded two floors above me. My apartment flooded and was unlivable for about a month. I had cleaning/​repair people in my apartment at all hours, including weekends. It was the absolute worst experience ever. Additionally, my apartment kept going lower down the «repair» roster because others were complaining about their apartments… which caused repairs to take much longer than they planned.
Overall, I would not live here again, nor would I recommend others to live here.

Lived here for a year and overall, I would just say that this place is so incredibly overpriced. Why anyone ever want to pay that much money for an apartment, I do not know. We moved here from CT, and had one day to find a place with a realtor. Our biggest concerns were being on the T and being very pet friendly (we were getting a golden retriever puppy, so we could not rent anywhere with size restrictions or that required pet references or training certificates – obviously an 8 week old puppy isn’t trained yet!). This place sure seemed perfect and it was very nice… it just cost way too much money.
Positives about the place:
1) It is very pet friendly (although when we were leaving, they were trying to start enforcing the 40 lb. limit for dogs, which would have excluded probably 60% of dog owners who were living there only because it’s close to the only building in Brookline that accepts big dogs).
2) It has on site parking garages (for an extra $ 200/​month/​space!!!)
3) It has nice balconies
4) Can’t beat the location – heart of Brookline, right on the T (although the C-​line is slower than a snail)
5) Has A/C…but…they turn the whole building’s A/​C on and off at the same date, and we had several 90 degree days both in May before they turned on the A/​C and in Sept. after they turned it off… try having a renter with severe allergies who can’t open the windows and a new puppy who is very heat sensitive melting in a 90 degree apartment while your A/​C is not only off, it’s actually still set to HEAT (that’s right, you can’t actually turn the heat all the way off until the A/​C comes on, so on those 90 degree days, you have to deal with heat coming out of your vents).
6) I guess the gym/​pool are positives, but we never really used them (both are small, pool is hardly ever open)
7) Maintenance was always pretty quick and effective for us… I’ve read lots of complaints, and maybe we just never had any really big issues, but it wasn’t a big deal for us.
Negatives:
1) EXPENSIVE! $ 2200 for a 1-​bed! And the rent was actually going up before we left! PLUS you have to pay for parking! It seemed reasonable when we moved in, but then we realized that you can get the exact same service, and as nice a place (often with free parking) through a private landlord for about ²⁄₃ the price. At that savings, you can afford to join a gym that’s a lot nicer than the one here anyway!
2) You have to pay for the laundry… seriously, $ 2200 a month and you still have to pay $ 3 for every load of laundry! Plus, a bunch of the machines were often not working.
3) The doormen (doorpeople?)…originally we thought this would be a bonus, but the truth is that you don’t need a doorman in Brookline – it’s ridiculously safe. We found most of the door staff to be excessively nosey and often quite annoying, like when they would consistently give us «advice» and criticisms on how to train our dog (especially when we’re paying more money to take obedience classes from a trainer who actually knows what they’re doing!).
4) Some of the construction is a bit shoddy… the walls are this crumbly plaster, so that we couldn’t hang anything on them, and when we tried to install towel racks in the bathroom (since there were none), the wall just crumbled away beneath our screws.
5) The elevators are terrible. There are only two elevators, and one was usually tied up by people moving (with that many residents, you’d think they would have a freight elevator for movers). Then they were tiny… so often, I’d be trying to take my dog out, and I would wait up to 10 minutes for an elevator to come, only to have it be completely stuffed full of people… guess we’ll be taking the stairs anyway (which was a problem, because young dogs aren’t supposed to take a lot of stairs and golden retrievers quickly get too big to carry).
6) We had a horrible lady bug infestation in both the fall and spring… was told it was normal for the area, but I’ve never heard of anyone else having that problem and it was truly disgusting… I felt like I was crawling with bugs from seeing 50 lady bugs walking around my windows/​ceiling.
Basically, we quickly decided to move after one year here. We miss the area, as we chose to move out to a more suburban area in order to have a yard for our dog, but we could have found a much more reasonably priced apartment on Beacon St. had we wanted to. You think are getting a lot of amenities in return for your $, but your apartment and lifestyle really aren’t any better or different than they would be in a (much cheaper) non-​luxury apartment.

My husband and I have lived in the Barclay House for over a year. We live in a 2 bedroom/​2 bathroom apartment and have a tandem parking spot for our cars. All in, we pay almost $ 3,000 a month to live in the Barclay House and have had nothing but problems since the day we moved in.
The Barclay House would have you believe it is a luxury hi-​rise with a rooftop pool and gym. The building is certainly not luxurious. This 15 floor apartment building has 6 washers and 6 dryers, of which at any given time at least two are broken.
The parking lot floods constantly. Anytime it rains or snows, it becomes necessary to wear galoshes to my car.
Worst of all is Tony Ferris, the manager of The Barclay House. Do not believe a word this man says. He is not to be trusted. When we moved in, our apartment was a nightmare from the prior tenants. We were told that while the unit was not redone, everything would be fixed. In the year we have been here, one of our showers completely collapsed (and took almost 3 weeks to fix), the door to our refrigerator will not stay attached, and many of our outlets still do not work properly.
If I could do it again, I would not live in the Barclay House. This building is a nightmare.

Apartments at the Barclay House are spacious, but the kitchens are small given the size of the apartments. The biggest issue with the building is maintenance — the building is worn, when things break it takes a long time to get repairs, and when they are done, they are done as cheaply as possible and are generally incomplete and need to be redone shortly thereafter. Complaints about leaks are ignored until they become major problems. The building does pay for heat, but the thermostats don’t work and your left to either have it too hot and open your windows or too cold — you get the drift. Further, building wide amenities are inadequate. The garage, especially the lower level, and bike room are constantly flooded allegedly due to a leaky foundation. This 15 story building only has 6 washing machines and 6 dryers — frequently AT LEAST one is broken. The wash cycle is only 15 minutes while the dryers take an hour — you can imagine the backlog. The one positive thing about the building is its pet friendly policies — both cats and dogs are welcome. Lastly, the level of service is far below what one would expect given the rents. The one positive thing about the building is its pet friendly policies — both cats and dogs are welcome.