This old house

Owning a historic home means being prepared for surprises, especially when renovating.

“Whenever you open up a panel or go to fix something, you have no idea what you’re going to find. And usually it ends up costing about three times as much,” said Amy Wright, whose home on Ardsley Place was built in 1926.

“Everything’s a little quirky — you’ve got uneven floors, the bathrooms are small,” she said.

It also means some of those quirks have a decades-old story behind them, sometimes dating back to the first owners. Homewood has a number of historic houses within its borders, and for owners who choose to preserve and restore the original look rather than update it, the story of the house is often worth the peculiarities and the cost.

“It was worth it to us. You wouldn’t necessarily get all that back in resale,” Peerless Avenue resident Derek Champigny said of the work he has put into restoring the look of his home. It’s about “knowing it’ll look the way it should.”

Derek Champigny and his wife, Vanessa, knew their home would take a lot of work to restore when they bought it from their next door neighbors in 2007. Their first renovations in the home included replacing the 1980s style kitchen — including its blue plastic counters — and fixing up an original bathroom where the floor was sagging under a clawfoot tub. The home also had a metal shed — a former horse stall — in the backyard and a dark, low-ceilinged upper story that Vanessa Champigny referred to as the “bat cave.”

“It needed lots of work,” Derek Champigny said.

“It did. My goodness,” Vanessa Champigny agreed.

As they redid the house — which included adding a dormer and additional roof height to the second story — the Champigny family drew on their love for historic homes to make the house look similar to how it might have looked when it was built in 1924. This included keeping the window casements and the clawfoot tub, as well as spending the extra time to seek out fixtures, hardware and tiling that fit the look of the house.

“The way we like to do things is [that] we like the authentic look. So we’re not really keen on making it look modern,” Derek Champigny said. “Because we want to keep it authentic, we tend to run over the budget to make things a certain way.”

They also found ways to reuse parts of the home’s history, including turning a window frame into a bathroom medicine cabinet door and refinishing the wood from the backyard shed to serve as a new bar and table for the home’s kitchen.

One of their favorite parts of the home is the wide front porch, where they can swing and watch daughters Genevieve and Vivienne play or talk to neighbors. The Champigny family’s house is registered with the Jefferson County Historical Commission and, in looking up information about the house, Vanessa Champigny said they connected with one of its earliest residents and found a picture of his mother standing on the same front porch.

Amy Wright’s Ardsley Place home is not on the historic register, but she shares the Champigny family’s respect for the past in preserving her own home.

Wright has lived in Homewood 18 years and moved to Ardsley Place with her husband Miles and sons Murphy and Sam four years ago. She said she would never consider living in a new home because they can’t match the character and timeless style of her home, nearing its 95th birthday.

“I don’t think you can replicate that in any way,” Wright said.

Previous owners have added on to the house, including a taller ceiling in the front room and a narrow staircase leading up to the upper story, but much of it, such as the plaster walls and windows, are original. Wright said they have mostly only made cosmetic changes.

“The thing about houses is being able to see beyond what they look like,” Wright said. “It’s just got the best bones. It’s a great house.”

The only exception is the kitchen, which the Wrights decided to renovate. However, she said she intentionally steered away from modern design. When they uncovered the original hardwood floors in the renovation, which had been damaged by time, they decided to keep and repaint them blue rather than putting down new floors.

The house comes with some challenges in day-to-day life, including that most windows won’t open and it’s almost impossible to drive a nail into the plaster walls, “but it’s nothing that would ever make it so that I would change my mind,” she said.

Corey and Andrea Tyree’s home on Lucerne Boulevard is one of the newest additions to the historic register, having received their placard this spring. Corey Tyree said the research and documentation process to be added to the historic register helped them understand what the house originally looked like and connect with some of its past owners.

“Now we know the story of the house,” he said. This included learning about multiple owners within the same family during the Great Depression as well as clearing up the age of the house, which the Tyrees had been told was built in 1938 but was actually constructed around 1929. 

The Tyrees, who moved to Homewood in 2015, found out that the carriage house, driveway and much of the first story — from the front porch to the arched doorways and fireplace — are original. The roof was raised after a tree fell on it in the 1990s, adding more space for the newer upstairs rooms.

The roof also lost a distinctive feature that Corey Tyree would like to put back: a gargoyle on one end of the house. 

“That seems like something that should be brought back,” he said.

The Tyrees’ goal is a consistent look throughout, including small details like stripping layers of paint off of one of the original doors and spending extra time to hunt down glass door handles instead of newer brass ones.

“We talked about replacing them. It would just be easier to make a new door,” Andrea Tyree said. “I would like for this home to look as close to as it originally did.”

It also includes challenging projects like making old doors and windows energy efficient. The Tyrees said they are considering larger restoration projects, such as adding dormers and replacing the asphalt roof with more authentic materials.

Vanessa Champigny described restoring a historic house as “not for the faint of heart,” but it’s important to her and her husband to stay “true to the house.”

“Getting it right is important to me,” Corey Tyree said.