Brought back to magnificence
When you enter the first-floor condo in this Civil War-era rowhouse on Beacon Street — a halfblock from the Public Garden — you can’t help but become enamored by the striking period details.
The living room is embellished with massive and heavy dark wood wainscoting panels that rise well over 6 feet and are adorned with small, ornate columns and spindles. Over the room’s entrance, a pediment appears like two ocean waves facing each other, and the iron fireplace is surrounded by marble and more lavish coffee-colored millwork featuring images of scallop shells and angels. Then there’s the gorgeous, curvaceous wood staircase leading to the lower floor.
Everything in the place — every groove, every block of dentil molding, every shell carved into the plaster ceiling — looks to be preserved precisely as it was when the house was built in 1862. But most of it was not. “It was a fixer-upper,” said Peter Gee of when he moved into the condo 25 years ago.
“The shutters were all torn up, most of them were missing,” he said. “The little columns in the living room, most of them were gone — they probably used them for firewood when the place was a boardinghouse.”
And, he said, Mexican tiles were covering the hallway floors and that lovely staircase was instead a steel and woodtreaded monstrosity that “looked like something from the Brady Bunch.”
Probably worst of all, the carpet in his daughter’s bedroom was set over a dirt floor.
After decades of living at the address and years of work, Gee and his wife are now selling the place for $2.25 million. Spread over 2,150 square feet and two floors, the luxury condo has six rooms, with most of the common ones upstairs and the bedrooms downstairs. The master bedroom suite has an archway entrance, an arched window looking out to the street, a marble bathroom and a big walk-in closet. The second bedroom has French doors leading out to the back brick patio connected to the sunroom. The entire place feels grand yet intricate, draped in decorations yet not overwhelmed by them, rich yet bright.
This is thanks to Gee and his wife who had the place — originally built by John Dunbar — restored, renovated and reworked to bring back the original architecture and to bring it up to modern times. They had those missing columns and spindles remade, the Mexican tiles ripped out and replaced with black-and-white diamond-shaped marble, the floors evened out and redone, and the kitchen moved up into the first floor and stocked with cherry cabinets and highend stainless steel appliances.
“If you peeled back some of the bad renovations,” said Gee, when talking about his first impression of the place that was converted to a condo around 1980, “you could see that it was a pretty magnificent townhouse at one time.”
The sale of the condo, which includes a deeded parking space, is being handled by Jessica Later, 860-729-1702.