Adele Marchetti

Adele Marchetti has spent fourteen years representing period homes on the west side of Winter Park, and in that time she has developed a particular affection for houses that have been lived in well -- the ones with a settled garden, a porch that has been sat on, and a floor plan that reflects a family rather than a builder's spreadsheet. Her work centers on the lakefront and golf-course neighborhoods between Interlachen Avenue and the chain of lakes: 1920s Mediterranean Revival houses, brick Colonials under old oaks, and the occasional mid-century house that a careful owner has kept honest. She is drawn to provenance, and will happily spend an afternoon in the county archives establishing when a house was built, by whom, and what has been changed since. That research is not a hobby kept separate from the job. For a buyer, it is the difference between a house that looks restored and one that actually is -- knowing which additions were permitted, which trees are protected, where the original footprint ends. For a seller, it is the material that makes a listing legible to the small number of people who will pay a premium for the real thing rather than a renovation of it. Adele holds the GRI designation and is recognized within Homesaro Realty as its luxury specialist, though she is uneasy with the word. Her higher-priced sales have tended to be quiet ones -- houses that never reached the open market, shown by appointment to two or three families over a season. She takes on a small number of listings each year and represents an equally small number of buyers, on the theory that both are better served by her attention than by her volume. Before real estate she trained as an architectural historian, and worked briefly for a preservation trust cataloguing early Florida residential architecture. Clients tend to find this out slowly, usually when she notices something about their house -- a roofline, a window proportion, a tile -- that they had stopped seeing. She lives in Winter Park, a few blocks from Park Avenue, in a 1926 house she has been restoring by degrees for most of her career. She is a longtime volunteer with the local historical association and has led its spring home tour more than once. For buyers and sellers who care about the specific history of a specific house, and who would rather work slowly and get it right, Adele Marchetti is glad to be asked.