Clarke Avenue home 'great' for entertaining — and privacy

Vicki Halmos, who founded the Entracte Theatrix production company, uses an apt theatrical comparison when she describes the layout of her 1928 house in Midtown, where elegance in the public spaces gives way to a more relaxed feel in the familys rooms.

You open the curtains or draw them closed, Halmos says by way of analogy. Its a great house for entertaining, but it has private family areas. It can be grand and stately in some rooms, but you walk down the hall and have a laid-back experience.

When she and husband Peter were house-hunting in 1984, their sons, Nic and Greg, were little.

With little boys, I needed to have adult rooms and family rooms, she said. When I was looking at properties, Id walk into a home and think, This is going to look like a bomb went off. I cant have people walk in the front door!

But when she saw a Mediterranean-style house designed by noted society architect John Volk at 315 Clarke Ave., she knew its configuration would provide the family with plenty of options.

While she hasnt changed its style and left historical elements intact, she has added an expansive media room between the main house and a two-story out building-and-garage on the back of the lot. The room with an open-beamed ceiling, a fireplace and a stone floor has large glass sliding-glass doors with fanlights above them. They open to the landscaped back yard, swimming pool, whirlpool spa and patios.

She also ordered some renovations, which included redoing the bathrooms and the kitchen, and combining smaller rooms to make larger ones, explains Halmos, whose theater company just closed a production of The Rocky Horror Show at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach.

Its a nice traditional house with high ceilings, good-sized bedrooms and bathrooms, and plenty of room. It sits on a 180-foot-wide lot, and we put in the swimming pool. It looks like a pond. We have enjoyed the yard, and it has lots of rare trees and native Florida plants. The yard is large, and new owners would have room to expand; they could even build tennis courts.

Today, with the boys in their 30s and her husband spending more time in Key West, where he keeps his boats, the Halmoses are ready to downsize. Theyve listed their five-bedroom, seven-bath, two-half-bath house with 9,918 square feet of living space, inside and out, with Sabra Kirkpatrick, an agent with Brown Harris Stevens, for $11.9 million.

The front door opens into a foyer, which leads to a stair hall. To the east are the living room and library. The living room features a fireplace with a wood mantel, crown moldings and French doors that open to a small patio and side garden.

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Clarke Avenue home 'great' for entertaining -- and privacy