A nearly 9,000-square foot Wiscasset estate that once held countless antique music boxes is for sale for more than $1.3 million.
Built in 1852 as a double house for shipbuilder Henry Clark and Captain George H. Wood and their families, the Georgian-style home was combined into a single living space in the 1920s.
The building now holds 12 bedrooms and eight bathrooms. The home on High Street, around the corner from downtown Wiscasset, sits on roughly an acre with gardens filled with sculptures and fountains.
The property is best known for becoming the house of Danilo Konvalinka and his family, and a seasonal museum known as the Musical Wonder house, which opened in 1963. The museum boasted an impressive collection of Swiss, French and Austrian music boxes from 1810 to 1910, all from the Konvalinka family and Douglas Henderson’s personal collection, according to advertisements for the museum.
The home also held German and American disc music boxes, player pianos, hand crank organs, performing musical dolls from France and mechanical singing birds, among other musical attractions.
While the museum operated for many years and became a local attraction, the trio of music box collectors who founded it had a falling out in the 1980s, which left only Danilo Konvalinka to operate it, the Lincoln County News previously reported.
Konvalinka suffered a stroke in 2006 and was unable to return home. After that, Joe Villani and Paulo Carvalho convinced Konvalinka to sign the Musical Wonder House’s collection over to them, according to the Lincoln County News. This ultimately left the original founders of the museum with nothing.
Villani died in 2011, leaving Carvalho as the sole trustee of the museum’s collection. However, the museum abruptly closed in 2014 and Carvalho sold the collection, let the bank foreclose on the house, and returned to his home country of Brazil, the Lincoln County News reported.
The historic home was “falling down, falling apart, because the former owners of the Musical Wonder House had died and their heirs let it fall into ruin and the bank took it back,” said Julie Cromwell, designated broker at Cromwell Coastal Properties and the listing agent for the home.
The sellers, a group of three, bought the home from the bank in 2018 for $171,000, according to Zillow, and rehabilitated it “back into its wonderful thing it is,” Cromwell said.
The house’s many restored rooms include a double living room, dining room, parlor and an updated kitchen, the listing shows. The formal entrance of the three-story home, which features a flying staircase — named because it appears to be suspended in air — is perhaps the most striking part of the home, Cromwell said.
Aside from detailed crown molding and more than a dozen fireplaces throughout the house, the property appears to have chandeliers in every room and on the two-story covered porches on the back of the home.
The home was listed in early July, 2025, for nearly $1.7 million, but the asking price has since been reduced twice to where it sits now at $1.35 million.
The home would be perfect for someone who appreciates historic buildings, or a bed and breakfast-style rental, given its size, decor and proximity to downtown Wiscasset, Cromwell said. But, the buyer would need to receive local approval to change what the property is used for.
However, Wiscasset does allow up to five rooms to be rented in a property without needing permission from town leaders, according to Cromwell.