Luxe listing: $2 million house off Rittenhouse Square comes with Eagles and architectural history
The home has been nurtured by two generations of architects.
Renowned Cuban architect and University of Pennsylvania professor Mario Romanach had just purchased the house at 2143 Locust St. when he discovered a piece of Eagles history in the basement. Near an ornate pool table with mother-of-pearl accents, beneath a bar with an elaborate walnut top, he found a large NFL championship trophy — given to the Eagles in 1949.
“It came up to my waist, just about,” said his daughter Maria Romanach, who owns the house now and has lived there since the 1980s.
The Romanach family purchased the house from Margaret Clark, the widow of John P. Clark, onetime owner of the Eagles, Maria explained. The trophy had been forgotten when Margaret Clark moved to the Main Line.
It’s just one of many quirky moments that define the soul of this house — memories that make it hard for Maria to believe that it will soon belong to someone else.
Originally built and designed by famed Philadelphia and North Carolina architect Charles Barton Keen in 1905, who also designed the three houses next to it, the 20-foot-wide, 6,000-square-foot home retains much of its original grandeur.
“All of the interventions that have been made, have been made in the spirit of the house,” Maria said. “Even though, for example, the stainless steel kitchen is very modern, we’ve never done anything to this house that contradicts the general circulation or the flow of the house.”
When Mario bought the house in August 1973, Maria and her sister were in graduate school. It was a lot of house for a couple with an empty nest.
“Dad bought the house because in his houses that he had [designed and built] in Cuba, all of his spaces were very large,” Maria said. It was, and remains, a spacious house full of light and graced on three floors by 10-foot-high ceilings.
The space also allowed Mario to convert some of the house into architecture offices, which became Maria’s offices after his death in 1984. Before Maria moved in full-time, Mario modernized the home, replacing radiators with forced air, doing the ductwork for central air, expanding a serving pantry by 6 feet into a spacious kitchen.
Maria, along with her architect husband, Berdell Buckley, made some changes, too: She added an elevator, redid the bathrooms with North Carolina granite, created a 15-by-10-foot dressing room, and added a kitchenette to the fourth floor, which can now function as an in-law suite or separate apartment.
Despite its historic pedigree, the house is modern, with details such as high-end appliances, track lighting for gallery-style artwork display, corrugated glass windows, two Stûv fireplaces, two wine coolers, green design elements, and heating and cooling systems that were updated in 2020 and 2021.
Though Maria and her husband are looking forward to a next chapter that includes plenty of travel and a home base in Florida, it will be an emotional transition.
“I just would love it if a nice person would buy it,” she said.
It is listed for $2,085,000 by Compass Real Estate’s Garden Group.