Instead of Painting It White, This Rare $2.95 Million Dallas Midcentury Home Got a Stunning, Moody Restoration

Fresh off a restoration, a “soulful” midcentury modern home has listed in Dallas, TX for $2,950,000.

“It’s rare to find something like this in Dallas,” says listing agent Amy Timmerman of The B·A·R Group with Dave Perry-Miller Real Estate/Luxury Portfolio International.

“When people buy these, they make them shiny and white. This is the exact opposite. The home feels soulful, deep and moody, like the house was intended to feel when it was built.”

Another design detail for Casa Rolinda is a covered serpentine walkway between the main house and the guest house, where the sellers have hosted friends and family.

“It almost makes it feel like you’re in a resort,) says Timmerman about the .722-acre corner lot.

There are a total of four bedrooms and six baths. Walls of glass create seamless synergy with the natural surroundings, while the many built-ins cultivate coziness.

After the sellers bought the home in 2022, they turned to Chad Dorsey Design for an interior makeover, and Bean & Co. Homes for the restoration.

“They saw a home he did in a magazine and knew right away they wanted him to do their home. He’s extremely well known and doing some pretty major projects,” says Timmerman.

To pull off the timeless aesthetic, Dorsey leaned into wood floors and beams, and installed walnut cabinetry.

“It’s much more expensive to do that than do a ‘white box’ and paint everything white,” says Timmerman.

For this project, “he took the house down to the studs but still maintained the style that was intended for the home,” she says.

This includes Venetian plaster in the foyer and a lighter-hued Venetian plaster in the primary bath. Numerous coats of lacquer in the executive office—featuring original dental molding—creates a moody space that also includes a secret door to a bath and another secret door leading to a closet.

A family room in the back of the house is another treasure.

“It feels like you’re in a treehouse, under the canopy of the trees, because the trees are so large in the back and the ferns feel like they’re in the room with you,” says Timmerman.

“It makes the room feel so much larger than it is, to bring the outside in.”

As the owner is a master gardener, she split-cut and replanted the property’s original ferns throughout the entire grounds, further adding to its resort-like vibe.

A rare amenity for Dallas is the home’s finished basement.

“It’s what the sellers use as their TV room and hang-out space,” says Timmerman.

Between 2000 and 2022, this house in the Sam Dealey Estates neighborhood in Kessler Park—3 miles southwest of downtown Dallas—changed hands several times.

Roland Pelt, who commissioned the design in 1951, lived there until around 1980 and was well-known as a Dallas City Council member. Casa Rolinda is named for his daughter. The sellers are the fifth family to own the home.

“We’ve had several families reach out to us who were original owners on the block and knew the Pelt family,” says Timmerman. “Everybody feels a sense of pride in how special the house is.”

The house is within a conservation district that features many other architecturally significant homes, and it ensures modern-day homes won’t be built.

“Most of the houses were built around the same time frame but the architectural details of this house lean more midcentury than the other traditional post-war homes in the neighborhood,” says Timmerman.

She adds that Kessler Park is unlike North Dallas, where “a lot of people at this price purchase homes”.

“There’s a large golf course (Stevens Park) that’s the anchor to the neighborhood, and very large lots and beautiful homes,” she says.

Nearby Bishop Arts District is also walkable, with boutiques and art galleries.

As the listing states, the buyer would be someone who appreciates an architecturally significant home: :Casa Rolinda is more than a beautifully restored home. It is a living work of Dallas modernism-an architectural original shaped by family, memory and imagination, thoughtfully preserved for its next chapter.”

Timmerman says most people who have looked at this particular home fall into two categories: families with young children looking to plant roots, or empty nesters looking for something in a different city.

“We’ve had people fly in from Austin, Chicago and Boston,” says Timmerman.