Old Seminole Heights Home Tour

Old Seminole Heights had its 7th Annual Home Tour on Sunday April 3, 2005. There were two good newspaper articles about it. I took photos of elements of the homes that I liked, or that I felt solved particular problems with these old houses.

TAMPA TRIBUNE
11 Dive Onboard Annual Home TourBy SEAN LENGELLslengell@tampatrib.com

Photo by: VICTOR JUNCO

The Old Seminole Heights Neighborhood Association will be holding it's 7th annual tour of homes on April 3rd. This year the home of Christie Hess will be on the tour.

OLD SEMINOLE HEIGHTS - The green shag carpet aside, it was love at first sight for Christie Hess.

``When I first walked in this house, I had an immediate sense of, `I'm home,' '' Hess said last week while sitting in the newly remodeled kitchen of her restored 1923 bungalow.

The carpet has given way to hardwood floors, and the house at 1011 E. Broad St. has received a makeover worthy of Home & Garden Television. So after a decade of renovations, Hess and her husband, Stuart, are showcasing their home on the Seventh Annual Old Seminole Heights Home Tour.

``There's still a lot of work to do,'' Hess said. ``But where else can I go to get what I have?''

The tour, sponsored by the Old Seminole Heights Neighborhood Association, is from 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Sunday.Tickets are $7 and available the day of the event at the Seminole Garden Center. Ticket price includes a guidebook with a map and descriptions.

The tour is a fundraiser for the neighborhood associations. Costs also are underwritten by First Home Realty.

Free parking will be available at the garden center and at Seminole Heights United Methodist Church.

Free transportation to each home will be provided by the Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority's yellow trolley buses. The buses will depart from the garden center every few minutes.

Artisans will sell wares, and a neighborhood Boy Scout troop will sell food on the garden center lawn. A Tampa Police Department mounted patrol unit is scheduled to make an appearance.

The self-guided tour will feature 11 houses of various architectural styles, many dating to the 1920s, including Tudors and bungalows - the neighborhood's signature style. All houses are on the tour for the first time.

Two of the houses were built since 2000s but designed to replicate historic bungalows.

The annual event is one of the most successful home tours in the city, routinely drawing more than 1,000 visitors. The 2003 tour set an attendance record with more than 1,600 visitors.

Photographs and descriptions of houses shown on previous tours are on the neighborhood association's Web site, www.oldseminoleheights.com.

Old Seminole Heights was developed in the early 1900s as one of Tampa's first suburbs. The neighborhood is bounded by the Hillsborough River on the north and west, Hillsborough Avenue on the south, and 22nd Street on the east. A panhandle extends from Hillsborough Avenue south to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard between Florida and Interstate 275.

The community, hit hard by suburban flight in the 1960s and '70s, has undergone a renaissance in recent years, spurred largely through a migration of new homeowners. Two historic districts were designated in the neighborhood in the 1990s.

Old Seminole Heights has priceless qualities impossible to replicate in newer or more expensive neighborhoods, Hess said.

``There's a sense of community, there's a lot of architecture, and the trees - they make a wonderful entryway into the neighborhood,'' she said. ``It's not cookie cutter.''
As people discover and renovate old homes in the neighborhood, the stock of tour- quality homes increases every year, Hess said.

``It's a great neighborhood,'' she said.

Reporter Sean Lengell can be reached at (813) 259- 7145. This story can be found at: http://tampatrib.com/News/MGB2IP62Z6E.html

ST. PETERSBURG TIMES
'Blue house' regains 1930s glory; [STATE Edition]
ELIZABETH BETTENDORF. St. Petersburg Times. St. Petersburg, Fla.: Apr 1, 2005. pg. 1.H

Everyone in the neighborhood called it the "blue house." The color resembled a bad '70s wedding tuxedo.

Eric Krause and Chad Daughtrey hated the hue, but fell in love with the house: a handsome-but-neglected 1939 Tudor right on Central Avenue in one of Tampa's largest historic neighborhoods.
Indeed, the colors were icky, the rooms sterile.

Krause remained undaunted. Right away, in his head, he started tearing down walls and arranging furniture.

"My goal was to make it feel as warm as possible the minute you walked in," Krause explains.

"The kind of place where you could sit around, kick back and take your shoes off without worrying about smashing the pillows."

Krause, 31, who works for Gage-Martin Interior Design, and Daughtrey, 36, a computer programmer, were both adept at fixing old Florida homes. They had each owned much smaller fixer-uppers in Seminole Heights. And both knew what would be involved in taking on a more sizable restoration, particularly for a serious preservationist like Krause, who always opts for original rather than reproduction:

"All the way down to the doorknobs," Daughtrey says.

One year after buying the 2,400-square-foot, four-bedroom, two- bath house, the couple will open their doors Sunday for the annual Old Seminole Heights House Tour.

The neighborhood's sprawling boundaries, which measure roughly north to the Hillsborough River, south to Hillsborough Avenue, west to the river and east to 22nd Street, take in some of the most unusual old homes in the city. The area offers such a wide swath of architectural styles that tour organizers rarely feature a repeat house unless it has been significantly remodeled.

This year's tour, heavy on historic Tudor and bungalow styles, features 12 houses, two of which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Expect to join about 1,200 people at the event, which takes place 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and costs $7.

Several new homes, built to look as if they sprouted at the turn of the century, also made the 2005 tour. That goes to show, tour chairman Christie Hess says, "that you can still build in an old style with all the modern amenities and not have cookie-cutter construction."

Krause and Daughtrey paid $210,000 for the house in March 2004 and estimate they've already put $70,000 more into it.

"That may not be a realistic goal for everybody," Krause says. "We've actually saved a lot of money because we're both very handy."

In a year, they managed to coax the exterior and interior into pristine, house-tour shape. They say they are still hard at work on the restoration but feel the house is ready to greet the usual throng of curious visitors.

"They did a great job in a very short period of time," Hess says. "I joked with them a year ago about whether they'd have their house ready in time for the tour - never dreaming they'd actually do it."

Inside, Krause has decorated with an eclectic blend of antiques, original abstract artwork, Oriental rugs, traditional furnishings and a few, choice-but- meaningful possessions.

"It's a clean design look but dates back to the period and authenticity of the house," he explains. "I also use a lot of antiques. It's definitely not contemporary."

For example, he converted an old brass carving platter once used in the dining room of a 1950s cruise ship (he found it in a salvage yard near the Port of Tampa) into a cocktail table by setting it on a wooden scissor stand base.

He restored a $25 Goodwill mahogany sideboard and topped it with an old French Onyx clock that weighs 80 pounds and that he purchased when he was broke.

"I didn't eat for a week," he recalls, laughing. "That's how much I wanted it."

The "Irish wake" dining room table is a new piece made from recycled barn wood held together with square-peg dowels.

The two joke it was one of the few pieces in the house they could agree on, though Daughtrey bought Krause as a birthday gift a quirky antique corner cabinet he once admired at the Missing Piece.

An old English secretary chest was a gift from one of his design clients who was moving out of town.

Around the fireplace, the couple chose to install a warm-toned granite that matched the original copper Mercury tile. All the doorknobs and related fixtures are duplicates of the 1930s originals in the house (all antiques and all rustled up by Krause, who loves to raid eBay for original architectural fittings).

Though the house was blue on the outside, the entire interior was painted the same shade of yellow.

Krause warmed the spaces with a sophisticated, masculine paint palette: a shade of brown latte by Ralph Lauren in the living room; a crimson red by Benjamin Moore in the dining room.
He also made liberal use of table lamps, including candlestick varieties and, by the front door, an old Chinese vase he converted into a lamp.

"Lamps cast a really warm light into any space," he says. "I like incandescent light combined with natural light. It warms up wood tones and warms up the way you feel. It makes you feel good."

The only truly new room in the house, Krause says, is the kitchen. He chose to gut and redo the room - notice the French Provincial cabinets - because he loves to cook and wanted a fresh space for food preparation and entertaining.

Upstairs, Daughtrey converted a second kitchen into a sleek bar and added a small, smoked glass-front beverage refrigerator he snagged for $100 at Home Depot. The cabinets are made of Jamestown cherry wood, the granite counter, a color he calls "absolute black."

They made good use of the two extra bedrooms by converting one to an office and the second to an attractive guest room where they've gutted and refurbished the closet using beadboard, their standard treatment for all closets in the house.

They've enjoyed the restoration so much that they recently bought the 1926 Craftsman-style cottage next door. Between them, they now own three houses in Seminole Heights.

As for the color of their Tudor house, the blue is out, out, out.

A warm taupe turned it from the color of a wedding tuxedo to a tasteful kind of place that invites a visitor to hang out on the front porch a while.

"Even the chimney was blue," Krause recalls. "It took the workers four days to sandblast blue off the brick."

[Illustration]
Caption: New lighting fixtures and new wall colors are some of the changes Eric Krause and Chad Daughtrey made inside the living room and dining room of their 1939 Tudor-style home. ; Eric Krause, 31, and Chad Daughtrey, 36, stand on the porch of their; home on Central Avenue in Seminole Heights.; Photo: PHOTO, STEFANIE BOYAR, (2)