List Price: $3,550,000
Sale Price: $3,400,000

The Property: Almost perfectly situated in tony Kenilworth, with prestigious public elementary and high schools within a few blocks’ walk and a picturesque park right across the street, this new 20-room home has the charm and hand-wrought details of an old-time house in the North Shore village, but a contemporary floor plan and mechanicals.

The house has seven bedrooms, five fireplaces-plus a sixth outdoors on the stone patio-an oversized third-floor playroom with built-in forts, and a 1,300-bottle wine room. There are three full kitchens: one in the usual place, another in the basement, and a third in the coach house. Just in case two isn’t enough, we suppose.

All details of the design, from the Nantucket stone and shingles on the exterior to clothing-shaped knobs on cabinetry in the second-floor laundry room, were the choices of Laurene McKirnan. She’s a principal in a homebuilding firm-the Fardowner Group-that has put up several homes, but was building for the first time in Kenilworth, where she lives.
“I wasn’t sure I wanted to build in Kenilworth, because it’s controversial sometimes,” she says. Once she took the plunge, she worked hard to make sure the house, though large, fit the homey informality of this part of town. “This wasn’t the place for a big, formal stone house that is heavy in stature,” she says. “There’s more of a warm, family-friendly feeling there, with frame houses and shake roofs.”  

Price Points: The list price was a markdown from $3.75 million, and even that was well below what the listing agent, Patti Skirving of the Hudson Company, believes the house would have snagged two years ago, during the market’s heyday. Back then, she says, it might have gone for as much as $4.2 million. “Even this year, if the market had been going better, it would have been $3.9 million,” she says.
McKirnan concurs, saying, “The timing could not have been worse.” For the seller, maybe. The buyers got quite a bit of house (and location) for the price.

Buyers: Not yet identified in public records
Listing Agent: Patti Skirving, The Hudson Company, (847) 924-4119