Luxe listing: Eight fireplaces, indoor parking on Center City’s most desirable street
The home, which is listed for $3.7 million, boasts five bedrooms and a library.
“You can’t help have an amazing sense of the history of Philadelphia when you live on a street like that.”
Bill Bollinger is talking about the 2000 block of Delancey Place, a street that has changed remarkably little since the mid-1860s. Though home base for Bill and Judy Bollinger is London, where they raised their two sons and where they now spend most of their time, their Delancey Place residence is the home they come to when they visit Philadelphia.
The couple has strong ties to the city. Judy Bollinger is a Wharton grad and University of Pennsylvania trustee, and the couple has a long history of Penn philanthropy. One of their sons lives nearby at 21st and Cypress. Every time they visit, and arrive at the home on Delancey Place, Bill said, “We feel like we’re stepping back into America in the 19th century.”
The 5,615-square-foot home is one of the street’s several intact Federal-style mansions on the National Register of Historic Places. The home’s history is obvious not only from its facade, but from the interior’s preserved architectural details, like crown molding and oversize wooden doors.
“I do love the old-world features of the house,” Bill said, while noting that he and Judy “fully modernized” the home, redoing the wiring, lighting, windows — “all of those things you don’t readily see but are so important to how you enjoy your house.”
Bill’s favorite room is the second-floor library. “It’s a very warm room, particularly with the fire in the wintertime,” he said. “It’s very, very cozy. It’s a great place to just read, to chat, to play games, have family conversation.”
It also works well for entertaining, he said — an evening might start with drinks on the library’s terrace with its view of the skyline.
“The way that the dining room flows into the sitting room, and you can pull these two large sliding doors to separate them. After you finish your meal, you have lovely cocktails with a nice fireplace in the sitting room, and then go through to the dining room and close those doors and it becomes a very intimate dining area. Then you open them back up and go through to the sitting room for coffee, then close them back up so you don’t have any of the mess behind you.”
They’d be happy to continue entertaining in the house, but in their retirement, they plan to spend more of their time in London. When they do come to Philadelphia, they can stay with their son. Still, Bill will miss the house on Delancey.
“It’s a great house, it’s a great area, it’s a fantastic city,” he said. “I love the juxtaposition of modernity with history. And that’s one of the things you get on that street and in that house, particularly.”
The Delancey Place home is being sold by Joanne Davidow for $3.695 million.