She has been staying there only for a few months, but Samantha Robinson knows why her grandparents loved their Elkins Park end-unit townhouse and the neighborhood.
“Everybody says hello,” she said. “Everybody looks out for each other.”
Her mother, Kerry Rosenthal, said her dad “really liked the wall space and the lighting. Being an end unit made it easier for my mom to grow things.”
Rosenthal said it’s possible to walk through the neighborhood and think you’re in a rural area until you hear the commuter rail train nearby .
Her parents — Beverly Green, a writing teacher, and Stephen Green, an attorney — bought the condo in the gated Breyer Woods development in 2011, expecting to renovate it so they could age in place. The Greens died in October.
The back porch with a permanent gas grill.
The 2,936-square-foot house, built in 1993, has three bedrooms, two full bathrooms, and two half bathrooms.
The main level has a living room with a working gas fireplace, a deck, and a dedicated home office that could serve as a fourth bedroom.
A two-car attached garage leads directly to the laundry room.
The living room has a working gas fireplace.
The upper level primary suite has vaulted ceilings and multiple closets.
The finished walk-out basement has a half bath and kitchenette and opens to a second private deck.
Community residents have access to a tennis court and can join the adjacent student center at the Elkins Park campus of Drexel University, which has a clubhouse and gym.
The kitchen.
The house is a short walk from the Jenkintown SEPTA station, and a supermarket is less than a half-mile away.
The house is listed by Frank Blumenthal at Keller Williams Real Estate Tri-County for $499,000.
“I hate to leave it,” said Stephanie Tauman, “but it’s just too big for me.”
Tauman has spent six years in her four-bedroom, 3½-bathroom 1957 mid-century modern home in Drexel Hill. She bought the house sight unseen in 2019 after viewing it online.
But now, at 3,314 square feet, “it has gotten very big,” so she is planning to move to a smaller home. Tauman, an artist and art teacher, hopes to settle in Philadelphia.
Living room
She does not know who originally commissioned the split-level house. She already owned some mid-century modern furniture and other items when she bought it.
The approach to the house is along a slate walkway with arts and crafts style light fixtures. The exterior is stone and mahogany, and the foyer has a slate and mahogany theme.
The four bedrooms are on the top level, and there are three terraces connecting to the outdoors.
Kitchen
The middle level has the foyer, dining room, kitchen, and sunken living room, which includes a working gas fireplace.
The first level has the family room, powder room, and two-car garage with a heated workroom.
The finished basement has Tauman’s art studio.
Front hall
The eat-in kitchen has a 36-inch cooktop, double convection wall ovens, Corian countertops, and refaced cabinetry.
The family room has a wet bar with sink and second dishwasher.
Terrace
The primary bedroom has an en suite bathroom with whirlpool tub, stand-up shower, walk-in closet, and views of Pilgrim Park.
Another bedroom has mahogany built-ins and could serve as a nursery or study. The hall bath has a large corner bathtub.
Primary bedroom
There is a high-capacity water heating system and landscape lighting.
The house is listed by Joseph Bograd of Elite Realty Group for $729,900.
Kai Lu and Edward Mendez had expected to spend many years in the spacious Media home, enjoying the easy access to Center City by SEPTA Regional Rail, the good schools for their two-year-old son and the second on the way, and its aura of history.
But in the words of Lu, who is in data analytics for a major communications company, “life intervened.”
Mendez landed his dream job as a data analyst for the Miami Marlins baseball team, and the couple are headed to Florida after two years in the house.
The living room. The home has four working fireplaces.
The five-bedroom, 4½-bathroom home was once the general store of Providence Village, and Lu says she doesn’t know when the changeover came.
The earliest part of the house dates to the 18th century, with some 19th-century additions.
The 4,334-square-foot house has three floors of living space plus an unfinished basement, and four working fireplaces powered by electric inserts.
Front hall
The home has its original hardwood floors and a two-zone thermostat system with central air and forced heat.
The newly renovated kitchen has quartz countertops, stainless steel appliances, gas cooking, a separate coffee bar and pantry area, and an adjacent sunroom.
The formal dining room has built-in shelves and a fireplace.
The kitchen, which includes a dining area.
The primary bedroom and another bedroom are on the second floor, along with a laundry room.
The third floor has three additional bedrooms — one of which serves as an office — two full bathrooms, and a full-sized cedar closet.
The formal dining room has built-in shelves.
Updates by the current owners include partial roof replacement, resurfacing and staining the hardwood floors, new flooring in the kitchen, exterior stone repointing, custom window treatments, and a new sewer line.
The house is in the Rose Tree Media School District.
It is listed by Amanda Terranova and Adam Baldwin of Compass Realty for $785,000.
For Cheryl and Jesse Jacobs, the three-bedroom, 2½-bathroom twin in Mount Airy had it all: friendly neighbors, good schools, nearby parks, and a short walk to the Sedgwick SEPTA Regional Rail station.
And for Jesse, a finished basement he called “my man cave,” where he played with the couple’s son.
The house had been in their family a long time. Cheryl grew up there. When her father died in 2013, they decided to make major renovations.
The home’s living room. There are working wood-burning fireplaces on the first level and in the basement.
They opened up the kitchen on the lower floor, reworked the primary bathroom to enlarge the shower, installed recessed lighting, and replaced the water heater and home heating system.
Now the Jacobs family — he’s a retired facilities manager for large corporations; she’s a semi-retired HR consultant — are downsizing to a home in South Jersey and planning to winter in Florida with their son.
The Mount Airy house, built in the 1920s, is 2,062 square feet and has a brick-and-stone facade.
The kitchen.
The main level has a large living room with hardwood floors, and the dining room has the original plaster detailing. Arched French doors lead into the kitchen, which has stained glass windows.
There are working wood-burning fireplaces on the first level and in the basement.
The three bedrooms are on the second level.
The basement could serve as a home office, media room, or in-law suite.
One of the home’s bathrooms.
The house has a covered front porch, a two-car garage with extra storage space, two green outdoor areas, and a rear patio.
Mount Airy Playground, Pleasant Playground, and Benjamin L. Johnston Memorial Stadium are all easily accessible.
The house is in the Henry H. Houston School catchment area.
It is listed by Cherise Wynne of Compass Realty for $600,000.
When Diane and Keith Reynolds moved back to the Philadelphia area from Austin, Texas, in 2023, and bought their house in Rydal, Montgomery County, they knew immediately that they wanted to remodel the kitchen.
But they also knew that project alone wouldn’t make a home they’d be satisfied with.
“We wanted to keep it craftsman style,” said Diane, referring to the arts and crafts movement of the late 19th century. The style is characterized by simplicity, emphasis on natural materials, and closeness to nature.
An exterior view of the Reynolds’ home. It was originally built as a Cape Cod, and a later addition brought in the craftsman style.
Keith, a software sales engineer for a technology company, said he specifically wanted to avoid a “cutesy” environment in the home. Diane, executive assistant for a trade association, called it “bringing nature inside.” It was the third house they’d lived in since they married.
Through an internet search, the couple found Philadelphia-based Airy Kitchens and designer Sean Lewis for the remodel.
“It was an interesting design dilemma,” Lewis said.
The house was originally built in the Cape Cod style in 1914, but when the previous owner added onto the home, he chose the craftsman style. By 2023, the kitchen needed significant updating for practical use. It had an unusual layout, opening up into a larger great room with high ceilings and a loft built from reclaimed wood towering over one side of the space.
The loft over the kitchen created a unique design task. The range had previously been placed underneath it, but it was relocated to another wall.
The loft was retained, but many other details were changed. “We changed a lot of the symmetry,” Lewis said.
For example, a full bathroom tucked behind the kitchen was made into a powder room, giving Lewis more kitchen space to play with.
The home’s kitchen after renovations. At the upper left, the reclaimed wood loft remains.
The refrigerator and gas range were reused. A new hood, dishwasher, and beverage refrigerator were added. The custom island — larger than its predecessor — is a stained cherry wood that was chosen to match the natural wood trim on the existing windows.
The backsplash is a multicolored earth-toned slate material in a chevron pattern, evoking the outdoors from within their kitchen.
“It’s the first time we’ve seen or used that material as a backsplash,” Lewis said, and it was the jumping-off point for choosing the colors in the kitchen.
“The assignment of rethinking a kitchen space is not unusual for us,” he said. But the home’s disparate styles and unique features, like the loft, beams, and open floor plan, created an “unusual design problem.”
“It’s quite unusual for a 100-year-old home to have a great-room layout with a vaulted ceiling,” Lewis said. “The reclaimed wood loft installed by the previous architect is something I’ve never seen before, and I’m sure will never see again.”
Maximizing storage was a no-brainer, and they accomplished that simply by adding cabinets.
One of the key challenges was providing counter space around the range. The range was previously located below the loft, but is now centered on the kitchen’s longest wall, between two windows, with the sink off to the right, just below a window. This allowed Lewis to add counter space around the range, for more practicality.
The backsplash tiles and wood stain were chosen to match colors from the surrounding yard.
The windows were left untreated in the Craftsman style.
Inside, woodwork was stained to match the outside.
The stove was relocated so it would be surrounded by counter space.The refrigerator was reused in the remodeled kitchen.
Diane said she and Keith looked at the house as a “homecoming” from their time in Austin, “a little bit like reclaiming our roots.” He grew up in the nearby neighborhood of Meadowbrook, and she is from King of Prussia.
“From the second we walked into the house it was so warm — we felt immediately connected. There’s something grounding about watching the seasons change,” she said. “It’s colors and leaves and movement. Every day it just restores me.”
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“It has a country feeling,” said Sruthi Selvam, “but if you walk out the gate, you’re downtown in 10 minutes. And the landscaping is beautiful.”
Selvam and her husband, Kamesh Arumuzam, spent three years in the three-bedroom, 2½-bathroom end-unit condo in the Naval Square community.
The couple bought the unit in 2022 while Selvam, a dentist, was in an international dental program at the University of Pennsylvania. Now the two, both natives of India, and their two young children have returned to California, where she is setting up a practice, and he is a software engineer.
Kitchen
The unit features a private terrace spanning the width of the property. On the first level, it has an open-concept living and dining area and a kitchen with Shaker-style maple cabinetry, stone countertops, a glass tile backsplash, Brazilian cherry hardwood flooring, and a half bath.
There is also a coat closet tucked under the stairs.
The second-floor primary suite includes an exposed brick wall, an oversized walk-in closet, dual sinks, a soaking tub, and a separate stall shower.
The open-concept living and dining area.
Two other bedrooms have French sliders that open to a covered terrace, a laundry area, front-loading washer/dryer, and shared hall bath.
The attached one-car garage has ample storage and an electric car charger, and there are dual thermostats and a Ring alarm system.
The primary bedroom.
The water heater was replaced in 2022, the HVAC system in 2024.
Community amenities include a pool and fitness center, picnic areas, guest parking and a community room.
A private terrace private spans the width of the property.
Naval Square is close to the South Street Bridge, the University of Pennsylvania, Rittenhouse Square, and Schuylkill River Park. It is also pet-friendly.
The unit is listed by Jocelyn Morris of Compass Realty for $749,000.
For Jennifer Rodier, it was “a wonderful place to grow up.”
The six-bedroom, 2½-bathroom stone house is on a wide Upper Roxborough street, perched high above a valley.
Her father, Walter D’Alessio, bought the house in 1969, and “he never wanted to let go of it,” Rodier said.
The formal living room has a working wood-burning fireplace.
D’Alessio headed the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority and Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp. and served under five Philadelphia mayors. He died in 2024.
Rodier, a nonprofit executive who lives in Lafayette Hill, is selling the place where she and her friends played hide-and-seek or cavorted in the large yard.
Window seat off the grand staircase.
She said the D’Alessios did extensive renovations on the house in their time there.
It is 4,406 square feet, and Rodier says it was built around 1910, with her parents only the second owners.
The house has a center-hall Colonial foyer, its original wide entry door with a leaded glass transom, original exposed ribboned hardwood floors, a grand staircase with a window seat, original wall light sconces and pocket doors, and a wraparound front porch.
The foyer’s original wide entry door has a leaded glass transom.
The formal living room has a working wood-burning fireplace, and the first floor includes the kitchen, breakfast room, powder room, and pantry.
The second floor has four bedrooms with large closets and a hall bath.
The third floor has the other bedrooms, including a large front bedroom that could be used for a primary suite, and bath with a claw-foot tub.
Reading nook with pocket doors.
The house has a full basement with a workshop and a storm door to the rear yard.
The sale could include some of the original furnishings, Rodier said.
The house is minutes from the Ivy Ridge Regional Rail station, Route 309, and the Schuylkill Expressway.
It is listed by Dennis McGuinn of Realty Broker Direct for $725,000.
Living in the Fox Chase Manor neighborhood in the mid-1990s, Linda and Mike Tobin admired the location of houses across the street. So in 1997, they decided to buy one and enlarge it.
They raised their two children there and sent them to the Abington School District. But now the children are grown up and have moved to Cherry Hill, where Linda is from, so the Tobins will follow them there.
Mike installs telecommunications systems for businesses, and Linda is a retired telecommunications professional.
The primary bedroom.
Mike said they were particularly attracted by “the quaintness of the neighborhood, the big oak trees,” and township-residents-only Alverthorpe Park, with its variety of athletic facilities.
So they undertook a major renovation of the house on one of the larger plots of Fox Chase Manor, with a two-car attached garage and driveway parking for four more cars.
The family room has a gas fireplace.
The renovation comprised an expanded eat-in kitchen, first-floor powder room, and a family room with a gas fireplace and a large patio.
The second level was expanded for the house to have four bedrooms, two full bathrooms, and a laundry room.
Entrance to the house is through a covered front porch into the foyer, living room, and formal dining room.
The dining room.
The second level has the bedrooms, and the primary bathroom has a stall shower and walk-in closet.
The partially finished basement has heat.
There are hardwood floors in most of the home, and tile in the kitchen and bathrooms.
A covered front porch at the entrance to the house.
The roof was replaced in 2015 and there is 200-amp electric throughout.
The house is close to Huntingdon Valley Shopping Center and a Giant supermarket.
It is listed by Don Rowley of Coldwell Banker Hearthside Realtors for $599,900.
When Hope Coleman and Nathan Fong were looking for a larger East Falls rowhouse for themselves and their two young sons, they settled on a house that combined character and practicality. It had a garage, very rare for a rowhouse in that neighborhood.
The couple — Coleman is a veterinarian and Fong a marketing professor at Rutgers University — moved into the house in 2019 but have now left for a larger house in Bala Cynwyd to accommodate aging parents on both sides.
“The stuff that gave it character was original,” said Coleman, describing the East Falls house.
The five-bedroom, 2½-bathroom home is 2,288 square feet.
The heated, window-lined front porch provides entrance to the living room with original cathedral glass and stained-glass windows, high ceilings, and hardwood and Second Empire architectural style indicate it is considerably older. Documentation says the house was built in 1925, but Coleman believes that the mansard roof and architectural style indicate an earlier construction date.
The living room features original cathedral glass and stained-glass windows.
The dining room has a butler’s cabinet and a powder room with a pocket door.
The renovated eat-in kitchen has solid oak cabinetry, granite countertops, a wide island with seating for four, and a beautifully restored Chambers stove complete with built-in warmer and broiler and griddle, vented to the exterior.
The wide kitchen island can accommodate seating for four.
Glass doors open from the kitchen to a private patio. A sunroom, added by the couple and connected to the kitchen, has underfloor heating, two skylights, and additional access to the backyard and side entrance, creating seamless indoor-outdoor flow.
Glass doors open from the kitchen to a private patio.
A back staircase leads directly from the kitchen to the second floor, which has three bedrooms, including a spacious front room that is used as a family room but can also serve as a large second-floor primary.
The hall bath has a stained-glass window and a laundry room, which has built-ins, closet space, and the home’s original porcelain sink hutch.
The third floor has two additional bedrooms and a newly added full bath. The rear bedroom could serve as a walk-in closet, office, private retreat, or a primary suite.
The house is listed by Lisa Denberry of BHHS Fox & Roach Chestnut Hill for $652,000.
When Beverly Allen bought the three-bedroom, one-bathroom house near Temple University at a sheriff’s sale in 1987, her son Devon recalls that he and his three siblings were not impressed by the neighborhood. They didn’t think the house was a promising investment.
But “she had the vision and we didn’t,” Devon Allen said as he prepared to sell the house where his late mother, head disciplinarian and assistant director of the ROTC program at Benjamin Franklin High School, lived until her death in 2020.
She did a considerable renovation of the house, and in her will, she left it to her four children with the provision that they divide the sale proceeds. It remained mostly vacant for three years — another son lived there during the COVID-19 pandemic — until Devon started further renovating it in 2023. Now, he said, he is convinced that the neighborhood is on the upswing and will prove that his mother’s instincts were correct.
“With the new construction going on around it, it’s very promising,” Devon said.
Vestibule of the rowhouse.
The 1,600-square-foot rowhouse in the Hartranft neighborhood is four blocks from the university and Temple University Hospital. It comprises two stories plus an unfinished storage basement with washer and dryer.
The interior has been totally repainted.
The house has high ceilings, a large eat-in kitchen, and hardwood floors. The lower level has an open-concept living and dining area, and all three bedrooms are on the next level. And there is a paved backyard.
Stairs of the home, which has hardwood floors.
The kitchen has granite countertops, white cabinetry, and ceramic flooring. The bedrooms all have ceiling fans.
The house is near the North Broad Regional Rail station, Fotterall Square park, athletic fields, and a dog park.
It is listed by Brian Wilson of BHHS Fox & Roach Center City for $225,000.
