7 Commercial Street

Delft Haven II Condominium (Unit 5).

Cottage 5 (Unit 5) has one side to the harbor, on the north side of the compound. Originally a freestanding building, it has since been linked to Unit 1 through a common area ornamented by a shallow colonnade. The two together form a bracket that encloses the north half of the central lawn at Delft Haven, creating a kind of shingled quadrangle. As originally apportioned, the 513-square-foot cottage had two bedrooms, a living room with fireplace, a kitchen, and a bathroom. When Peter L. Boyle and John J. Boyle made Delft Haven a condominium in 1977, the first buyer of Cottage 5 was a resident of Arlington, who paid $43,500 for it. He sold it six years later, for $90,000, to a New Yorker, who added a Brookline resident to the deed in 1986. The Brookline owner sold Cottage 5 in 1990, for $152,500, to three Connecticut women, from Guilford, Meriden, and Middlebury. By 1996, the Meriden resident was the sole owner. She sold the unit to a Boston couple for $205,000. The current owner of Unit 5, also a Bostonian, purchased it out of foreclosure in 2007 for $290,000.

Cottage 5 in 2011. Photograph by David W. Dunlap.