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The humble bungalow - restored

Looking for fabulous ideas on how to rehabilitate bungalows? Come hear an expert share her wisdom at a free event in Seminole Heights on Thursday.

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published April 14, 2006

OLD SEMINOLE HEIGHTS - Jane Powell knows bungalows so well she jokes that the five books she has written on the subject add up to a sort of bible.

The nationally renowned restoration consultant and preservation author has made a career of explaining how to rehabilitate just about every room in a bungalow, from kitchens to bathrooms to living spaces.

Her latest book Bungalow Details: Exterior offers bungalow owners - and aficionados of the style - practical nuggets on dealing with subjects like sleeping porches, art-glass light fixtures and river-rock columns.

"The problems or issues that bungalow owners face are not dissimilar from general old-house problems, but frankly it's a lot easier to fix a bungalow than a Victorian,'' she said last week by telephone from her own bungalow in Los Angeles.

On Thursday, Powell will share her wisdom with local homeowners at a free event sponsored by the Seminole Heights Neighborhood Associations. Her lecture on bungalow exteriors from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Seminole Heights United Methodist Church, 6111 N Central Ave., will address topics such as lighting, paint colors, doors, windows and general exterior decor.

"The biggest issue for homeowners - of any historic building, not just bungalows - is windows,'' she said. "I've devoted a whole chapter to window replacement. There's a huge, multimillion-dollar window industry out there devoted to getting people to replace good, double-glazed windows with aluminum clad.''

The Tampa Bay area, much like Memphis, Chicago and parts of California, teems with historic bungalows, something experts say may have to do with the timing of the first suburbs as well as the bungalow's adaptability to Florida's climate. Seminole Heights is a neighborhood rich with handsome old bungalows, many lovingly restored down to the built-in bookcases. Many homeowners strive to make the outsides of these homes as beautiful as the insides.

Some people, like Suzanne Prieur, a historic home Realtor and ardent preservationist, get it intuitively. Prieur and her husband, Dennis, live in a 1920s California-style bungalow in Seminole Heights that they bought in 2004. The house has a large and beautiful front porch and original "wavy-glass'' windows that Prieur loves to look through into her garden. She painted the bungalow a color palette that includes a golden yellow, terra-cotta, and three shades of green.

"When we bought the house, it was pale yellow - a color that looked like Casper the Friendly Ghost, only slightly jaundiced,'' she recalls. "I started out with two colors, with a wish for a third color, and then ended up with five. I wanted the house to look like Florida.''

Prieur said she took her inspiration from an attractive area rug that she and her mother found at a Home Depot Expo store in Pasadena, Calif.

"It looked so cheerful, and most arts-and-crafts decor is not cheerful at all, but somber. They were escaping Victorianism and pulling from nature."

By definition, a bungalow "is difficult to define,'' Powell writes in Bungalow Details: Exterior. She goes on to explain that bungalows descended from thatched Bengali peasant huts in India and were possibly crossed with hip-roofed peasant huts called "chauyari'' (meaning four-sided) and then crossed again with the standard British Army tent.

Arts and Crafts-style bungalows, made famous by Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene, the brothers behind the turn-of-the-century Pasadena architectural firm Greene and Greene, was a movement that grew out of a reaction to Victorian excess and the Industrial Revolution.

Many people believed the Industrial Revolution tore apart the family, denigrated the craftsman, took the farmer off the farm and made the machine king, Prieur said.

"Craftsman-style bungalows go back to nature and restore the family, with their fireplaces, bookcases and porches where the family could be together,'' she said.

As a Realtor, she said, demand for historic properties that have been respectfully restored and kept intact is high, especially among clients with a lot of money to spend. Original craftsmanship is so superior, rebuilding such a house today would cost considerably more than many people could afford.

"My feeling is that when you alter these houses, including the exterior, it is financially stupid. Would you put plastic handles on a Ming vase?"

Powell, who traveled the country with photographer Linda Svendsen, studied a wide swath of geographic styles and quirks including bungalows made of logs and shingles, others with massive chimneys composed of rounded granite rocks and the "zany'' bungalow architecture of the West Adams District of Los Angeles, which, Powell said, "wins the prize for the biggest concentration of zaniness on one neighborhood.''

Powell said she found there were regional variations in bungalows as well as similarities: Memphis bungalows had a lot of porte-cochere(a porch roomy enough for a carriage to roll through), while Milwaukee's are brick and usually prairie style (a style marked by low horizontal lines, open interior rooms and made famous by architect Frank Lloyd Wright).

Exterior differences, she said, give cities their own unique texture.

Prieur, who organized the Powell lecture, said she believes that properly restoring and caring for the exteriors of bungalows and other historic properties is essential to "keeping Tampa looking like Tampa.''

[Last modified April 13, 2006, 14:37:07]