7 Commercial Street

Delft Haven II Condominium (Unit 17).

Cottage 17 has the — dubious? — distinction of being the first of the Delft Haven units to sell for seven figures; though just by a matter of months. Robert C. Duffy, the co-founding partner of Marc Jacobs International in New York, purchased it early in 2005 for $1.18 million. (Later that year, Unit 6 went for $1.1 million.) At the time, Duffy was building a home, gargantuan by Provincetown standards, at 27 Commercial Street, so this was presumably a useful pied-à-terre from which to keep tabs on the construction. By the way, you could fit 11½ of these cottages into 27 Commercial, if you were so inclined.

The L-shaped, 781-square-foot cottage stands north of the original campus, appearing to be more attached to 9-11 Commercial Street than to Delft Haven. The odd jump in designation — from Unit 8 to Unit 17 — can be explained by the fact that the Delft Haven I Condominium at 10 Commercial Street has claim on the units numbered 8 through 16.

When Peter L. Boyle and John J. Boyle made Delft Haven a condo in 1977, they sold Unit 17 for $42,500 to a couple from North Scituate. They flipped it the next year for $68,000. The purchaser, a Boston resident, owned it for 11 years before selling it to a New Yorker for $225,000 in 1989. The New Yorker and his wife, by now settled in Phoenix, sold it in 1992 to a Boston resident for $247,500. The Bostonian was the owner who managed to hit the million-plus mark with Duffy, who owned the cottage for seven years. He sold it in 2012 to the present owners for $835,000.

Delft Haven’s first million-dollar cottage, Unit 17, in a 2013 picture taken for the Town Assessor.