The Brooklyn Trust Company Building was designed by York and Sawyer in the Renaissance Revival style and is patterned after the Palazzo della Gran Guardia in the Italian city of Verona.

[6] Just prior to the construction of the current building, the corner of Clinton and Montague Streets was occupied by a house, which had been built in the 1850s as the residence of politician George Taylor and became the bank's headquarters in 1873.

[3][17] The Brooklyn Trust Company Building's facade and interior are both protected as New York City landmarks,[10] and the structure was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.

[14] The ground and third stories comprise the base, which is clad in blocks of rusticated and vermiculated limestone above a pink-granite water table.

[20] The fourth and fifth stories are treated as a piano nobile and contain a colonnade of double-height engaged columns and pilasters in the Corinthian order, which in turn are made of smooth limestone.

[3] On the Montague Street elevation of the facade, the main decorative element is a round arch at the center, which is accessed by a stoop[21] with five steps.

When the bank is open, the wrought-iron gates retract into a rectangular Roman Imperial-style frame made of fine-grained limestone.

This frame contains rinceaux with scrolled acanthuses, as well as motifs of flowers, birds, animals, and urns with centaur-like figures on either side.

[3] At the mezzanine level, there is a lunette atop the arch, divided into three sections by vertical bands, which contains a stone grille with floral and urn patterns.

[23] Atop this lunette is a cartouche of a shield with a carved eagle and inscriptions of two years in Roman numerals:[3] MDCCCLXVI (1866), when the Brooklyn Trust Company received its charter, and MCMXV (1915), when the building was finished.

[29] The checkerboard was intended to symbolize the state of being constant; by comparison, the oak tree was supposed to signify "strength and antiquity", and its exposed roots may refer to the fact that the bank had "nothing to hide".

[18] When the structure was built, most of the building was dedicated to the Brooklyn Trust Company's operations,[31] including bank vaults in the basement and offices on the first three stories.

The openings on both the west and east walls are separated by rusticated pilasters, which support a cornice with motifs of running dogs and acanthus leaves.

[39] At each corner, the lower section of the wall has a marble revetment, above which are piers that support an architrave containing octagonal and trapezoidal shapes.

[39] A Renaissance-style shield is placed atop the center of each door frame, above which is a panel with a carved phrase, which itself is flanked by various reliefs.

At the center of the ceiling are circular medallions with floral patterns and Greek-key borders in the second, fourth, and sixth bays from the south.

[41] The main office has a fireplace mantel made of dark gray marble; a doorway leading back to the banking room; and pilasters that divide the wood paneling into several sections.

The other walls are arched at their tops and have plaster carvings of urns, leaves, and vines, which support a vaulted ceiling with similar plasterwork decoration.

[42] When the building opened, there was also a "retiring room" or lounge for female bank patrons, which was designed in the Adam style and had black walnut and old blue furniture.

[42] The annex on Pierrepont Street originally had three stories of offices for the bookkeeping department, which was connected to the banking hall by a series of pneumatic tubes.

[42] On the fifth floor was a corridor that retained its original wood wainscoting, as well as doorways with wooden frames and transom bars on both sides.

[12] The Brooklyn Trust Company was chartered in 1866 and moved to George Taylor's old house at the corner of Clinton and Montague Streets in 1873.

[5] Under the terms of the sale, the bank was required to start construction on the clubhouse's site within two years, and the club was to occupy two stories in the new building.

[60] The Brooklyn Trust Company continued to expand during the early 20th century, opening additional branches throughout New York City.

[70] The Stahl Organization announced in December 2012 that it would convert the annex of the Brooklyn Trust Company Building to 13 condominiums.

[12] The plans included the construction of a new residential lobby designed by Barry Rice Architects, as well as restoration of the windows and the facade;[73] the banking hall would not be modified because it was a city landmark.

[79] The cheapest units cost $3.35 million;[12][80] the high prices were attributed to what one real-estate agent called "great architectural plans given the limitations of the existing building".

[40] The Standard Union wrote: "With the lofty Mechanics Bank Building at the other end of the block, they will be twin pillars of Brooklyn's financial system.

"[15] A half-century after the building's construction, architecture critic Henry Hope Reed Jr. wrote that the bank "is one of the finest of the sort".

[13] According to Reed, "even that lovely northern Italian city [Verona] would not scorn this hall, with its Cosmatesque floor (marble work which resembles mosaic, as done by the Cosmati family of mediaeval Rome) and its high, polychromed ceiling".