$649,900
Style: Victorian
Year built: 1897
Square feet: 2,850
Bedrooms: 5
Baths: 1 full, 1 half
Sewer/water: Public
Taxes: $5,341 (2016)
Everybody needs options, the opportunity to see what life is like on the other side of the door. This fully restored Victorian in Dorchester’s Meetinghouse Hill neighborhood offers choices, particularly for where the master can lay his or her head.
There are also two decks here. The first, on the left-hand side of the house off the driveway, leads into an updated kitchen with stainless-steel appliances and an array of long butcher-block counters atop white cabinetry. The gas stove is flanked by granite counters, and light pours in from five windows.
From here, a short hallway — there are white cabinets topped with butcher block on one side and a half bath on the other — empties into the dining room, where the house shows its sense of style and its age. In one corner is a built-in hutch with glass doors that appears ready to continue guarding the “good china’’ for another 120 years. The room also features waist-high bead-board wainscot, crown molding, and a bank of three windows.
A door at one end of the dining space leads to the family room, which has one of the home’s three working fireplaces. This one is framed above and to the side by built-in bookshelves. A short passageway lined with bookshelves separates this space from the living room, in the front of the house. Here, a bay window seat is positioned across the room from a fireplace.
The living room is just off the foyer, as is a long mudroom. A stairwell with board-and-batten wainscot and flanked by hidden storage spots at its base leads to the second floor, where there is a full bath and four bedrooms. Here, there is a choice of masters: a practical 21st-century version with a nicely sized bedroom connected to a large, sun-splashed office carved out of a sleeping porch or what might be considered the romantic’s choice, a bedroom featuring a working fireplace with a carved-wood mantel. There’s a walk-in closet. The other two bedrooms are nicely sized.
The fifth bedroom, on the third floor, was created by finishing the attic space, which also contains a bonus room.
The flooring in the house is original, refinished, and believed to be mostly fir.
The laundry room is in the unfinished basement. The gently sloping 0.24-acre lot is lined in the front of the house and behind by boulders of Roxbury puddingstone, the same material that forms the home’s foundation and was used to build the church across the street.
Nadine Fallon of Great Spaces Real Estate in Dorchester is the listing broker. As of presstime an offer had been accepted on this property.
Follow John R. Ellement on Twitter @JREbosglobe. Send listings to homeoftheweek@globe.com. Please note: We do not feature unfurnished homes and will not respond to submissions we won’t pursue.
