When I was 20, I spent a strange afternoon driving around South Philly with a middle-aged Italian woman and a stray cat. I was in the middle of moving out of a disastrous roommate situation, and she was giving me a ride, but first we had to bring the cat to her mechanic, whose garage off of Oregon Avenue was home to several former strays.
We passed through Girard Estates on the way, where she told me that her uncle had been an infamous don in the South Philly mafia. (I was too young to recognize her uncle’s name, but the mechanic knew who he was, and was suitably impressed.) “This is where all the mafia families live,” she said. Apparently when she was a teenager the mob wives would have her pet sit for them when they went out of town.
(Members of the Philadelphia Crime Family live all around South Philly and nearby towns in Jersey. Notably, Girard Estates is where Philip Testa, the “Chicken Man,” lived, and where he was killed by a nail bomb planted under his front porch.)
Now whenever I see a particularly charming bit of South Philly decor, I like to imagine that there’s a mob wife behind it. Most houses here are simple-on-the-outside brick rowhomes – it is one of life’s great delights to enter an apparently plain house and find it filled with kitsch. One of my new hobbies in long covid life is searching zillow for such treasures, taking a virtual tour of the houses where I live since I can’t actually go for a walk at the moment.
I like to start in Girard Estates. You never know which houses might have belonged to the cat woman’s mob wife friends.
A Color Scheme Dream on South 15th Street
Here we have an excellent example of an unobtrusive facade. Absolutely nothing noteworthy – a house that looks almost exactly like the neighbors’.
And then the tiled vestibule opens into a living room where someone has made the transcendent choice to make the wallpaper, carpet, and radiators match in various shades of maroon. I also admire the wrought iron railing for an indoor staircase, which I’ve typically only seen outdoors. And then, through the wonderfully shaped arch, is the even more maroon dining room.
Here we have not one, but TWO complimentary maroon wallpapers, divided by a maroon chair rail. One of the doors has been painted the same shade (but for some reason, only one?). There’s a crystal chandelier. The half wall to the kitchen has a weird angle on the side. Excellent work all around.
The kitchen isn’t particularly kitschy or interesting, but it has a few noteworthy features. Someone cut an extra piece of the living/dining room carpet and put it on the tile floor. Why? Who could possibly say, but it was genius imo. Then there’s the textured glass in the back door, which is kind of fun, and the weird little Tiffany-esque light over the sink. It’s also weird that the handles are smack dab in the middle of the cabinets like that, but why not!
The economy of color continues upstairs, with the living room wallpaper carrying up the walls into the hallway. The same carpet is in two of the three bedrooms, which appear to be painted with the same dark purple paint that was used for the chair rail in the dining room. The third bedroom, inexplicably, is the same green paint as the kitchen, with blue carpet. Perhaps this is the house’s lace-curtained mancave.
On to the bathrooms. There is a tragic lack of photos here, with only one poorly cropped image of each half bath. For the second floor full bath, we have the same muted avocado green that graces the kitchen and third bedroom. Apparently this shade was chosen to compliment the green tub and radiators in the bathroom. I love a colored tub, though they’re always better when complimented by a matching sink and toilet. The sink here does have an interesting Hollywood-Regency-esque cabinet beneath it, though it’s mostly cut off in the picture here.
I can’t tell if the first floor half bath has a sink. It looks like it might just be a toilet encased in more of that magnificent wallpaper. Kinda gross, but I guess the kitchen sink is right there. Meanwhile, the basement half bath is wood-paneled. I’ve lived in many houses with wood-paneled basements – classique!
Most South Philly basements that I’ve seen aren’t finished like this one, but concrete or dirt-floor dungeons with laundry machines, so this is a fun bonus. The zillow listing claims these floors are “marble” which I can’t possibly believe is true, but the faux-natural random shapes of the rock pieces is a fun choice.
Anyway, forget the third bedroom, this baby is the mancave! There’s even a dry bar. I can just picture a brown sectional down here for sharing brewskies with the boys. And note the carpet on the stairs – that same blue from the third bedroom. Whoever decorated this house is a real reduce/reuse/recycle icon.
Wallpaper Wonder on South Croskey St
A few blocks northwest in West Passyunk, we have another simple brick exterior, this time with a small front porch (luxe!) and some sexy yellow vinyl siding.
We have a lot of genius decorating ideas here. The metallic wallpaper on the far wall by the kitchen is probably my favorite, though I wish there was more of it. I love the use of what I’m pretty sure is actually an upholstered dining chair as an armchair. I would very much like to own that mirror hanging above the couch. The super thick valance that doesn’t match the sheer curtains makes no sense to me, but does feel like the choice that someone’s grandma would make.
Not to mention, I don’t think I’ve ever seen carpeted floating stairs before – something about it feels almost contradictory. This carpet looks pretty plush though, and seems like it would be nice for walking around barefoot, especially in the winter.
This is a more typical rowhome layout than the one on 15th street, with one long room that stretches back to the kitchen, that people divide into living room/dining room sections with their furniture. There’s no vestibule, so instead they have two front doors (also very common around here) and it seems like they leave the interior door open so they can get more light during the day. Sometimes in the summer people with this setup will just leave both doors open so they can get a breeze, since these houses usually only have one or two windows on the ground floor.
The mirror also helps with the lack of windows = lack of natural light problem. A lot of rowhomes used to have an entire mirrored wall to reflect the light, but most modern homeowners remove these, so now you mostly see them in rentals.
Moving on to the kitchen! Look at how tiny that TV is! In the first picture you can see a remarkable three wallpapers at once! (Enlarged to the right.) It’s always interesting to me when people use wallpaper in lieu of a tile backsplash, which I would imagine is much easier to clean & won’t stain/discolor over time. But what do I know – I rent!
Only one of the three bedrooms is actually interesting; the other two have plain painted walls and basic furniture.
But this one has more metallic wallpaper! I love metallic wallpaper, which is so incredibly dated and lacking in subtlety. This one doesn’t photograph as well as the one downstairs, but you can still see the sheen a little bit and I’m guessing it’s more silvery in person. The weird seams on the blank walls make me wonder if the wallpaper used to extend all the way around the room but either got taken down or painted over at some point.
I also love this matching bedroom set. (Not sure where the actual bed is, but oh well I guess.) It’s the kind of furniture that’s recently become cool again as styled by the tiktok interior design girlies.
The last noteworthy bit of design in this house is in the hallway, where I have a question for us all: is that just textured drywall, or is there carpet on the wall? I’m pretty sure it’s not carpet, but I really hope it is.
Honestly an Enigma on League Street
Our most expensive house so far is a little ways northeast in Bella Vista. Did I mention that I love metallic wallpaper?
Now that’s metallic baby!! The bamboo pattern is deeply questionable, and that carpet is truly repulsive, but oh man has this house seen some shit. I have one million questions about the people who used to live here. I feel certain that this living room smells like decades of cigarette smoke.
The carpet goes part way up the walls. The furniture and decorations are all gone but that clock is still there for some reason. We have another indoor wrought iron railing, which is maybe more common than I thought?
My favorite feature is definitely the mirrored chimney, which is quite frankly a stroke of genius.
If you’re bold enough, you can bring basement trends upstairs with a wood-paneled kitchen! The design choices in here are so dark and heavy, thank god that the skylight at least opens it up a little bit, with more shiny gold on the ceiling to match the living room. I’m trying to figure out how they got the backsplash to exactly match the countertops. Did they put the same laminate on the walls? Literally so innovative.
There are so many strange details in these rooms. I want to figure out how many different types of wood are in this house but I don’t even know where to begin. I think the upper right room (once again featuring some of the dirtiest carpet I’ve ever seen) is actually some sort of veneer and not real wood, unlike the other rooms.
I also can’t make sense of this house’s layout at all. There are five bedrooms, and they’re on the second and third floors, but I’m baffled by where they all are in relation to each other. I’ve stopped trying to figure it out and now I’m just admiring those doors! And that stained glass window! Neat!
This exposed brick room is beautiful, and so confusing in comparison to the rest of the house. The light fixture has a very saloon-like vibe to it which is fun, and seems to fit with the stained glass and the wooden wall somehow. But also part of the floor is randomly a piece of plywood, and the ceiling doesn’t seem finished? Once again, I have a lot of questions for whoever is selling this place.
The bathrooms here are pretty underwhelming. I like the continuation of the gold in the one on the right, but after the incredible commitment to such a specific aesthetic on the first floor, I was hoping for something more than what appears to be the cheapest appliances and cabinetry that were available.
Grandma Chic on Moore St
Honestly I think this house is so cute.
The carpet looks so soft and it reminds me of moss. I like this mirror even better than the one in the Croskey Street house. The chairs and lamps and draped window valance are all kind of glamorous; something about the vibe here feels very Old Hollywood starlet’s dressing room.
The dining room is a bit more simple – no massive gold flower statue in here –but I get the feeling that there was a lot more going on before it was photographed. The china cabinet is empty, and there was probably quite the collection in there at one point. A shame they toned it down for the staging.
These rooms are also wallpapered, by the way, though it doesn’t seem to have photographed particularly well. A pattern in neutral tones is definitely far more fun than what I initially thought was just tan drywall.
Once again, we have hardware right in the middle of the cabinets, and they’re weird little knobs instead of handles. There are a couple of really great details here, like the plastic chiles on the wall and the horse statue on a table with a single chair.
The bedrooms are pretty basic, but they have some beautiful antique furniture. I particularly love the dark wood dressers.
Now that’s a bathroom, baby! Usually these monochromatic bathrooms have matching tubs and toilets – this toilet probably had to be replaced at one point, which is a bummer. But the sink and mirror are exactly what I would expect from the person who decorated the living room. They don’t quite go with the blue tile and walls and tub, but who cares? It’s fun.
I’m sure this table is brought upstairs when there are dinner guests, but doesn’t it look like someone’s having secret meetings in the basement? (Here is a classic South Philly basement, by the way. Purely utilitarian.)
A Pink Palace on Wolf Street
It’s a dream of mine to one day live in an all-pink house, and someone in Newbold is part of the way towards living my dream. (Obviously, the outside of my dream house would be pink as well.)
I absolutely adore this entryway, with the pink rose window and the weird semi-open vestibule and the curved tile pathway through the carpet. There is something so disgustingly precious about the dusty rose carpet and walls paired with the antique white and dark wood furniture plus the floral wallpaper on the stairs. It’s almost suffocatingly feminine and dainty – it’s trying so hard to be elegant that it circles around again to become ridiculous and delightful.
I would like to live here and force my friends to come over for annoying little tea parties with fussy little cakes and pastries. This is presumably the dining room, though they’ve just stuck a random couch and chair across from the china cabinet. The chandelier definitely feels on brand though, and I love the green trim with this wallpaper.
The kitchen is a disappointment, so I lumped it in with the dining room. They carried the wallpaper through beneath the chair rail (WHY a chair rail in this room…), but this is pretty much your standard, dated, was once very nice kitchen. I would install pink cabinets, personally, at the very least. (This house in the same neighborhood has excellent pink kitchen cabinets, but the photographs were so shitty I decided not to include it in the post.)
I think all of this honey-toned wood would irritate me if I lived here, but they chose a color scheme that compliments it well. The globe-shaped light in the hallway is fun, and I like the lattice detail on that one window. I will never understand the point of a valance with no curtains, but the person selling this house is definitely a lace kinda bitch, so I’ll let them have their fun.
This is the only bathroom picture in the listing, even though there are two bathrooms. Why?? I like the wallpaper though.
There’s something so intimate about looking around someone’s house, and it is admittedly strange that we can now do that online for just about any address. I’ve always been nosy about these kinds of things, and I’ve always loved house hunting, both as a kid when my family moved and as an adult looking for an apartment. It’s fun to imagine the lives of the people who lived in a place, and to picture what it could look like if you bought it.
The decoration of an everyday home has always been more interesting to me than what’s curated by designers or professional decorators. My favorite thing about zillow is that it lets us look at how other people live, even if what we’re seeing has been cleaned up and edited a bit for the cameras.
And if you find the houses of South Philly interesting, my friend Isa does ornament walks around the neighborhood on tiktok sometimes, where she spots beautiful details in the architecture around here. She also makes videos about white supremacy’s influence on architecture and design which you should absolutely watch if you, like me, love looking at houses and want to learn more about the political influences on the trends you see.
Stay funky.
xoxo
Franny 💋 🏠