Photographs Donkin Media

The townhouse at 245 South 3rd Street is one of thirty-seven low-rise homes designed by I.M. Pei as part of his celebrated 1960s plan for Society Hill — one of the most influential urban-renewal projects of the twentieth century. While Pei’s three thirty-one-story towers concentrated the development’s density near the river, the townhouses were its connective tissue: grouped around quiet courtyards and tuned to the scale, brick, and rhythm of their colonial neighbors. They are contemporary homes hidden in plain sight along an eighteenth-century streetscape.