List Price: $1.69 million
The Property: The rustic style of the exterior and main interior rooms of this Wheaton home are a tribute to the Vermont skiing club where Ed Morgan, who built the house with his wife, Sally, skied back in the 1950s. And while there are no ski runs in Wheaton, the Morgans made the home into a resort of sorts, with a huge stone fireplace wall, a swimming pool and pool house, and a lake for swimming and fishing.

The Morgans—he was a longtime executive at ServiceMaster—raised their seven children at the rambling home they dubbed Kandahar. Having moved to a smaller place, they put the six-bedroom, five-plus bath home on the market in June.

Central to the house is a ski lodge–like family room, a vast space with two fireplaces, stairs to an open loft, and large windows—some of them stained glass—that look out to the very large pool deck. Most of the other rooms will need renovation—not only the dated kitchen and baths, but also the assorted tandem bedrooms and other layout quirks that were designed to accommodate a large family. The kitchen, breakfast room, and laundry room could easily be reconfigured as a contemporary open kitchen/family room. The garage has space for four cars.

The need for updating aside, Kandahar is a lovely place, as you will see in the video. The house itself is set well back from the street under big trees on nearly three acres of grounds. The property originally contained about five acres, but the Morgans, who had lived in the house since the early 1960s, subdivided the land over the years, in part to make room for homes for some of their children, says their agent, Denise Gill.

When I visited, the pool had been shut down for clean up after storms flooded the area, but the pretty lake, about 75 yards from the house, beckoned. Stocked with fish and now ringed with several houses built after Kandahar (though the main house retains access to it), the lake has a little dock and a fountain. It’s resort-style living, but with great Wheaton schools and shopping close at hand.

Price Points: The asking price acknowledges that a buyer will wind up spending more on renovations, although those costs could vary, depending on the scope of the project any new owners undertake. Less than half a mile away, a 19th-century house about half the size of this one but on a lot of roughly the same size was recently sold for $1.35 million, says Gill, the agent on that sale as well.

Listing Agent: Denise Gill of Baird & Warner; 630-639-0908 or denise.gill@bairdwarner.com