East English Village Fixer Has Charm to Spare for $89K

The good news about this 3-bedroom 1.5-bath brick-and-stone English cottage style house is that it's beautiful from the street. The stone cladding around the window and front door moves the style towards storybook, a fun subset of the English styles we're used to seeing in Detroit. Built in 1937, the 1700-square-foot house has what you want: hardwood floors, fireplace, screened in porch off the master bedroom, crown moldings, original light fixtures, and a mosaic tile entry. The bad news: the realtor brags about "new carpeting" in the family room (there aren't pix, but we assume it really happened) and a "faux fireplace" in the (also not pictured) basement.

The house has marble window sills, and a cedar closet. There's also a detached 2-car garage and the home got a new furnace in 2001 and a new roof in 2006. The place clearly has potential, with its oak staircase and wrought iron bannister. The bathrooms have original tile, and the outside will take your breath away. The kitchen remains a mystery, and the carpet sounds like a terrible idea. Given that the realtor focused mostly on the positive, it's hard to say whether it was simply too difficult to operate the cheesy camera on a cell phone (the primary method of real estate photography in metro Detroit, alas) or if the rooms were so terrifying that they broke the .5 megapixel camera.

Either way, the things we can see show a home with tons of potential and at $89K, there's a lot the right owners could do with the place, either because they want to live there forever or because they'd like to put some cash into remodeling and try to profit from a sale. Given the relatively low prices most listings in the area ask, you'd be hard pressed to flip this house. If the housing bubble in Boston Edison and Indian Village drifts to English Village, maybe this one could re-list after some improvements for a modest profit. Time will tell, and we'll keep an eye on this one. Curbed readers abhor a greedy flipper, but anyone who polishes this gem to its full, glorious 1930s potential deserves a round of applause—or, at the very least—to have pictures of the update house splashed all over Curbed.

·16850 Chandler Park Drive[Estately]