4051 Linden Hills Boulevard, Minneapolis, MN 55410

Some streets are named after what they used to be. This one still is one — Linden Hills Boulevard is the last road in Minneapolis still legally called a boulevard, a title every other parkway lost in 1968. Laid out in 1888 as the carriage route between Lake Calhoun and Lake Harriet, it's still owned by the Park Board, still paved in the red-tinted asphalt that once marked it as different from an ordinary street. You won't find that in a photo. You'll only find it by standing on the boulevard itself, at the address that carries its name. 4051 Linden Hills Boulevard was built the way people used to build when a house was meant to outlast them — an owner-commissioned Tuscan villa, raised to bring up a family in the neighborhood where their own story started. That intention is what you feel walking through it, more than what you see: the quiet of solid limestone and cedar beams, the particular way afternoon light lands differently through arched openings than it would through a standard...