HULL /Spring Valley Road
Feel welcome among friends, neighbors

By BARRY SMITH
For The Patriot Ledger Area: 2.53 square miles

POPULATION
2000: 11,050
2007: 11,783

Density: 4,849 res./square mile
Median age: 42
Median household income: $58,846

FINANCES
Tax rate: $9.75
Town budget: $30.9 million
Average water/sewer bill: $913

HOUSING
Median home price (number sales)
2007: $360,000 (123)
2008: $385,000 (13 through Feb.)
Median condo price
2007: $343,750 (50)
2008: $449,000 (3 as of Feb.)

SCHOOLS
Number of students: 1,235
Number of teachers: 108
H.S. grads to 4-yr. college: 61%
H.S. grads to 2-yr. college: 11%
Median SAT score (2006): 1441

Spring Valley Road is part of a tucked-away neighborhood on Green Hill.

The dead-end street climbs up from a bend on busy Nantasket Avenue and is recognizable by its ledge outcroppings and patches of pudding stone.

"They're beautiful homes ... a very quiet neighborhood set up high on a hill," said Ida McNamara, owner of Charisma Realty.

"This is like a hidden gem as far as I'm concerned," homeowner Peter K. Hajjar added.

But secluded doesn't necessarily mean remote.

"It's great because you walk to the shops and restaurants ... and the Ocean Club and the beach," resident Maureen Moline said.

A home in the area with a three-car garage is listed at $669,000. Part of the appeal is the proximity of commuter boats in Hull and neighboring Hingham and the Cohasset commuter rail station is a five-minute drive.

Peter and Suzanne Hajjar are selling because their eight-room, four-bathroom custom colonial with yellow clapboard front and clear-stained shingled sides.

It's just too big for the two of them now.

"We're going to stay somewhere around here, probably find a condo right around this neighborhood," Suzanne Hajjar said.

"It's just a friendly atmosphere," Peter Hajjar added.

The neighborhood social life includes an Octoberfest party held in the street and an occasional progressive dinner with neighbors moving from house-to-house for different courses. There's also a ladies-only "cookie swap" party at Christmastime, they say.

Arthur W. Anderson and his wife, Patty Irving Anderson, have been renting their slate blue clapboard Cape-style home with navy blue blinds for five years.

The neighbors welcomed them with gifts when they moved in, they remembered.

Newcomer Julie (Capen) Bregoli moved in about a year ago and has the same view of the area. "It seems like a real nice neighborhood, real nice people," she said.

She said she, her two teenagers and dog, Poochie, are enjoying the three-story saltbox colonial with dark green blinds they're renting. "It has a gorgeous view of the ocean, view of Scituate light -- Minot Light -- that blinks 1, 4, 3," she said.

"I can't say enough about the neighborhood," Matthew Murray said. He described his neighbors as "friends for life, now."

With "much reluctance," he, wife Kelly and their children, ages 5, 3 and 1, will be leaving -- they too have outgrown the house. The expanded Cape is offered at $575,000.

The dead-end has only nine homes on it, including two older homes fronting on Nantasket Avenue.

A stately five-bedroom red brick colonial that stands out to motorists coming up Nantasket Avenue from West Corner was once a rectory for priests at St. Mary of the Assumption parish.

Some of the homes stand on land that once belonged to the Archdiocese of Boston, Moline said. South Shore builder John S. Barry is credited with building four homes in the 1990s while Robert Burwick of Scituate put up two houses.

John S. Liffmann has lived in his 1912 house at the corner of Nantasket Avenue and Spring Valley Road -- with its "Roxbury pudding stone" outcroppings and mortared stone foundation gazebo -- for almost 30 years.

Liffmann, a rowing coach, said he knows all of his neighbors. "It's a great place to live," he said.