On The Market: A Neo-Victorian in Hyde Park

This Hyde Park foursquare is just four years old—but you’d never guess it.
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A new look.
3086 Victoria Ave., Hyde Park. Listing price: $1.8 million.

Photograph by William Manning

“It just looks like it fits here,” says David Boggs of his and wife Michele’s four-year-old Hyde Park home. In fact, if you drove down Victoria Avenue looking for a newer house, you’d probably pass this pale green structure right up.

The architect’s original drawings “looked more like a Homearama home,” says David. But when they scaled back their plan, the Boggses modeled the home’s exterior instead after a yellow foursquare they’d always admired on Observatory Avenue, right down to the front porch with three hipped roofs.

Beauty here is definitely more than skin deep, as reflected in the home’s LEED Platinum status. Details both large (insulated concrete-form exterior walls, a four-well geothermal heat pump, and a 25,000-gallon rainwater cistern) and small (abundant windows to encourage the flow of natural light and reduce electricity usage) ensure efficiency all around. In fact, this 4,300-square-foot home’s average gas and electric bill, says David, is $274 a month, a figure its more (ahem) elderly neighbors might envy.

As hard-working as it is, both environmentally and aesthetically, this house—on the market today for $1.8 million—has some downright fun features, too. There’s the built-in Miele coffee machine in the breakfast room (Boggs swears it pays for itself if you compare the cost of a Starbucks fix every day), but a close second is the half bath that doubles as a walk-in dog shower. The room’s slate floor has a drain running the length of the back wall and a hand-held shower wand directly above that. So Fido just walks in, gets hosed down and the water drains into the floor. The shower wand also comes in handy, Boggs notes, for bathroom cleanups; a quick spray of the wall-mounted toilet and you’re good to go (did we mention the couple has two teenaged sons?). That feature alone is enough to elevate this house from just another pretty Hyde Park face to the coolest kid on the block.

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