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| | | Patience paid off with renovated 1880s home | | May 15, 2009 | | | | Staff Writer | | Renovation fatigue is among the worst enemies of historic homes. Dwindling funds and bad decisions have certainly claimed casualties, but sheer exhaustion causes many well-begun projects to unravel into slapdash fiascos.
The patience and focus needed to complete a careful restoration of a historic property are on display in the four-bedroom row house at 832 D St. SE. Owner Mark McIntosh gutted nearly the entire red-brick structure over the past few years but maintained as many original features as possible through painstaking effort.
“All the wood had been painted over,” said McIntosh of the now-gleaming bare wood surrounding the living room’s fireplace and lining the stair’s banister. “That took forever.”
Also carefully preserved are pocket doors and the stained-glass transoms that top the ground-floor windows in the home’s rounded three-level tower. At one time a turret capped that structure, but a lightning strike in 1930 put an end to that, McIntosh said.
When McIntosh bought the home, there was an apartment in the lower level — where the home’s kitchen was originally. Now that floor is again the heart of the home, with a family room and thoroughly modern kitchen that also features the circa-1887 home’s original kitchen fireplace.
Workers must have been thankful to install this kitchen downstairs: Massive sheets of marble cover not only countertops and backsplash but also one entire wall. A pot-filling faucet is like a punctuation mark on that wall and adds convenience for cooks working over the Wolf gas range. Wall ovens are also Wolf; the refrigerator is by Sub-Zero.
Custom cherry cabinets cover a huge amount of real estate here and stretch into the adjacent eating area. Where the kitchen was in 2005, when McIntosh bought the property, is now a ground-floor study or sitting room. The mahogany floors in this completely rebuilt space contrast with the original heart-pine boards found elsewhere, but McIntosh said that matching the original wood was impossible. Better, he thought, to go in a clearly different direction than to aim for a partial match.
Living and dining rooms — painted, like much of the house, in a soft wheat — take up most of the ground floor, and here too McIntosh highlighted what was original and complemented, not copied, the home’s style with newer features.
The living room, therefore, is dominated by an original fireplace and its framed mirror, while the dining room’s new built-ins have a vintage touch but don’t slavishly mimic the more elaborate style found in original woodwork here.
But McIntosh did restore one feature original to the dining room — a dumbwaiter to ferry items from the kitchen below. “We use it all the time,” McIntosh said.
The second floor was broken up into three bedrooms when McIntosh purchased the home. Now, two larger bedrooms share the floor.
The home’s bathrooms are another comfortable compromise between historic and new. Vintage-look vanities don’t look fussy thanks to cool and colorful onyx-and-marble-tiled showers. In the master bath, a claw-foot tub is added to the mix.
That master bathroom, McIntosh noted, is sizeable, but buyers have the option of making the entire third floor a master suite by incorporating the home’s smallest bedroom into a master bath. The plumbing is already in place, he said. Other master-suite features are already here, including an enormous dressing room complete with washer and dryer. The master bedroom itself has the most enviable view in the house from its tower-room perch.
McIntosh is sanguine about — and even embraces — the quirks of living in a old house. Walking up the tipsy interior stairs, McIntosh said he liked the slight sag. “It’s shored up now, so there won’t be any more,” he pointed out. “But it is what it is — I didn’t want to ruin the character it brings.”
That doesn’t mean that McIntosh eschewed any high-tech improvements behind the scenes. That’s clear from viewing the home’s guts in a sub-basement — a feature than veteran Realtor John Lumsden said he’s never seen in a Capitol Hill home before. Wired for sound and Internet, the home also got a power boost (from 150 to 400 amps), a 250-gallon hot-water heater and dual-zone heating and cooling.
Two projects are ready for the next owner: The roof is fully prepped for a roof deck that McIntosh planned but didn’t complete. Hot and cold water, cable, electric and gas are installed and waiting. The second project is an ongoing one in the home’s rear patio. Grape vines are growing on supports and ready to produce the best estate wines on Capitol Hill, said McIntosh.
This four-bedroom, 4.5-bath corner property is listed for $1,375,000. For more information call John Lumsden or Richard Newton at 202-387-6180. | | | | | Log in to comment on this article |
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