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Homes

Cottage returns to 1923 prime

The owners hunted down and adapted period fixtures, trying to avoid reproductions.

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published March 4, 2005

Bill and Linda McGill bought a 1923 cottage in southeast Seminole Heights with the idea that they would coax back its youthful charisma, hard to imagine with its homely front awning and a driveway that missed the garage by a couple of feet.

Paint peeled off in sheets. An aging picket fence looked shabby even in the bright Florida sunlight.

Still, it had possibility, Linda thought.

Maybe even curb appeal.

"I knew the minute we walked in that I liked it. It was small and funky looking," Linda says. "Something about it reminded me of a little house in San Francisco, a city I love."

Her husband, Bill McGill, a Tampa house painter known for transforming some of the city's most beautiful old homes with his tasteful color palette and perfectionist's touch, was a lot more reticent.

"It was a total shack. I hated it," he recalls of his first reaction to the house on a quiet street not far from Nebraska Avenue. "I didn't want to buy it at all."

The two-bedroom, one-bath 1,032-square-foot cottage posed the usual lavish problems that typically accompany decades of benign neglect, including spotty wiring and unreliable plumbing.

The shower leaked from the bathroom to the outside of the house. Paint covered once beautiful heart pine floors. Worse, the water heater was jacked up on cinder blocks in the yard, the air-conditioning system was failing, and a dreary, 1950s kitchen needed gutting.

Two and a half years later, the house is not only fresh and updated, but looks so fetching from the street that strangers stop to ask who lives there.

"We dream about what this area could be, about how we could change it for the better," Bill says. "We know what it was once like when the homes were beautiful and there was a business on every corner.

"Our 92-year-old neighbor used to ride the trolley to her job downtown. We're seeing things starting to change again. People are slowly buying houses and fixing them up."

Now the McGills frequently indulge in a new weekend hobby of grabbing coffee and driving around restored areas of Seminole Heights perusing bungalows for ideas.

"We work well together," Bill says of their seamless team approach to renovating. "Linda comes up with ideas, and I help produce them."

The couple, who have been married five years, sold Bill's new house in South Tampa and then bought the bungalow in southeast Seminole Heights.

"I wanted to start with something fresh, something that belonged to both of us," Linda recalls.

Bill's painting skills and Linda's knack for decorating transformed the home's exterior from plain-faced to Craftsman-style charming; in essence, they created their own curb appeal by removing the old aluminum awning and selecting a new color scheme: a palette of red, buttery cream and white.

A reproduction "period" light fixture, as well as new soffit brackets and a nine-pane glass and stained-wood front door give the house renewed character.

"It was once the worst house on the block, but it's slowly becoming the nicest house as we complete it," says Bill, who plans to brick the front walkway and extend it to the street, turn the back sleeping porch into a study, and reposition the driveway.

At this point the kitchen is the real conversation starter, an extreme makeover conversion that the couple achieved slowly with plenty of patience and sweat equity.

It's also the result of Linda's vision, culled from 1920s home magazines, historic Sears catalogs, even the Martha Stewart collection at Kmart (where she bought the blue and white faux hand-embroidered curtains with teacups.)

A second-grade teacher at Belle Witter Elementary School in Tampa, she's so passionate about teaching and research that it spills over into her design approach. Her curiosity is contagious: She boned up extensively on architecture and design from the 1920s and '30s, and even framed a square of early linoleum she yanked from the kitchen floor.

"I love my kitchen," Linda explains. "Just like in teaching, it's the details that really make the difference."

Such transformative touches include historic, hanging brass light fixtures salvaged from a local grade school. Though it might have been cheaper to buy reproductions, the couple opted to have the old lights professionally polished and restored.

Explains Linda: "You can buy reproductions of these, but I wanted originals that I could touch and feel and know were from the 1930s."

She achieved the overall effect by combining old with new: She found an original 1930s milk glass wall light to illuminate the stove and trimmed the new 2-inch tile counters in a slick black, red and mint green mosaic pattern reminiscent of the flapper era. The wood and glass cabinets show off her antique collection of Jadeite glass, old CorningWare and historic appliances, tins and coffeepots.

Although the McGills paid $79,000 for the house, the sensible price tag meant lots of repairs. Because they did much of the work themselves, they estimate they've spent only $30,000 so far to bring the house back to its original condition.

What work they couldn't do themselves, they hired out to local craftsmen. They shopped a lot of small, locally owned businesses (the 1950s TV cabinet came from Triage) and in unexpected places: They found their red vinyl and chrome kitchen chair and foot stool at 30,000 feet in an airplane while flipping through Sky Mall magazine.

Whenever they could, they tried to hunt down and then adapt period fixtures, plumbing, even appliances. Bill recently bought a 1923 Kohler bathtub out of a house in Hyde Park; and Linda bought a 1929 green and yellow porcelain-over-steel Eureka stove from eBay.

After recently watching a show on the subject on HGTV, they found a business in Atlanta that repairs the ranges.

"We just have to find time to drive it up there," she says.

Bill recently built a linen cabinet into the bathroom, complete with a door and hardware that look straight from the year the house was built, something he feels will ultimately add to the history of the dwelling.

"Some 80 years from now," he mused while opening the closet door a crack, "whoever owns this house will look at that cabinet and think, "Wow, that's been here all these years. It was built by someone along the path, along the way to what this house is today.' "

[Last modified March 3, 2005, 09:12:11]