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Tribeza
Take a century-old Victorian, add two new owners determined to update it just right, and you get a house that keeps history alive and livable.
Not many houses get a total makeover for a hundredth-birthday present. The big Victorian on Baylor St., built in 1904 as a wedding present from a wealthy Austinite to his daughter, stayed in the same family for a century, while the neighborhood bloomed around it. It was never remodeled, except for the addition of an enclosed porch onto the second floor in the back, in the 1930s.
When Tyson and Nicole Tuttle bought the house, they were in love with the history of the place, but didn't want to live entirely in the past. The sprawling house had only window-unit air conditioning, for example, and the place had only one working bathroom. The Tuttles decided to bring the house up to date, but to do that in a slow, gentle process that interior decorator Fern Santini terms "a revision." Architect Mell Lawrence says that his clients presented him with the conundrum: Find the "sweet spot" between historic and modern. Lawrence found the biggest challenge to be balancing between the desires of Tyson, who wanted the home to retain historical character, and Nicole, who wanted a more updated look. "I wanted to find the things that would make them both clap in pleasure," he says.
The biggest changes that he made took place on the second floor and the attic. Lawrence suggested turning the attic into a master bedroom. The resulting light-filled hideaway is a far cry from a Victorian top floor stuffed with trunks and creepy old pieces of furniture. "I talked them into removing the ceiling from the [second floor] corner bedroom, so it went into the attic space," Lawrence says. "That really made a huge difference, because that room in the corner faced east and south, and it had nice windows and a door that led into the balcony, and so that let the light come into the upper space." The attic bedroom's ceiling is now one big skylight, and there's a hatch that leads out to the widow's walk, which had been in disrepair and off-limits for safety reasons. Although Austin has no ocean to search for signs of returning sea-captains (the traditional function of the widow's walk on shoretown houses on the Eastern Seaboard), the hilltop position of the house means that the widow's walk is a "funny little spy spot," as Lawrence says, with a beautiful view. The finished attic added a thousand square feet to the house's original square footage of 3,800.
The other substantial change was a big, two-story glassed-in porch installed in the back. Lawrence points out that although the materials are new, the proportion and scale of the window openings were intended to make the porch fit in with the existing architecture, and the structure stands in the same footprint as the former screened porch. On the inside, the porch functions as a general "hubbub space," as Santini calls it, or a transition between the kitchen and the backyard pool area. The space houses Nicole's desk, the bulletin board covered with family activities, and a wall of cubbyhole shelving for storing the flotsam and jetsam of the household. In a prime example of the collaborative spirit that took hold among the renovation team, the vine pattern on the floor was actually conceived by Lawrence, with colors chosen by Santini, and eventually painted by Lawrence and one of his assistants.
The kitchen, as anyone who's lived in an unrenovated Victorian might expect, faced a more complete overhaul, as well. The windows stayed in the same places, but the banquette was moved, an updated Viking stove installed, and the original dark finished long leaf pine cabinetry was removed and switched for new paint grade wood, painted a much more cheerful bright red. Santini tossed and turned over this color for weeks, she says, knowing how important it would be to the final look of the kitchen. "It must have been sample number 25 when we finally got the right one," she says. "I had dreams about the color. I wanted that real, true lipstick red. But in the end, all of our patience paid off--the color is perfect."
Then there were all of the technical problems, which Santini and Lawrence both had to work around in their planning. For instance, Santini really wanted to update the light fixtures, and found that, especially in the attic room, the choice of hardware came to depend very much upon the technical capabilities of the wiring in that part of the house. "To turn it into a modern, working house, a lot of the infrastructure had to be done," Lawrence points out. "The clients wanted air conditioning and heating in it, and that was a huge problem to figure out how to do that without making it show. We had to sneak all that in there without creating problems and messing up the structure of the house." Lawrence credits the contractor, Joe Pinelli, with ironing out these issues in a way that worked with the more aesthetic concerns of the architect and interior decorator. "That company really knows what they're doing when it comes to restoring," he says. (Santini adds that Pinelli was the one who came up with the color of the pale-blue paint for the ceiling of the sweeping front porch--a historically accurate hue that Santini played up by replacing some of the cushions on the wicker furniture with a complementary fabric.)
Despite all of these changes, Lawrence and Santini point out, parts of the house retained significant aspects of their original setup. The dining room, for example, though stripped of its heavy drapery and now full of light from the windows facing the front porch of the house, still has a ceremonial feeling, with the custom table and chartreuse cowhide upholstered chairs as the center of attention, and the original on-angle fireplace in the corner. The staircase, which is, of course, a major feature of Victorian architecture, taking pride of place in the foyer or entrance hall, still impresses visitors with its verticality and stateliness. In one of the aspects of the renovation that that leaned toward historic restoration, the original wood was painstakingly revived.
The entryway to the house on Baylor Street features about forty historical photographs of the structure and the surrounding area. There are pictures of weddings in the dining room, of children sitting on the stairs at Christmastime, and of the exterior of the house at a time when, as Santini says, "it looked like it was in the middle of nowhere." Although Austin has filled in around it, and its inhabitants now wear jeans instead of bustles and top hats, the house is still a place for a family. "There are all the amenities and comforts of a new house," says owner Tyson Tuttle, "but with a feeling of place and history that would be hard to recreate." Time for the next hundred years to begin.
Tribeza
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