Category: Real Estate

Goodwyn Street was once part of Geraldus Buntyn’s cotton plantation. Buntyn’s house, one of the few extant antebellum houses in Memphis, stands on the west side of the street. After Buntyn’s death in 1865, his property was divided into 81 lots. Several new streets were installed in the subdivision in the early 1900s, including Goodwyn, named for R.D. Goodwyn, Buntyn’s son-in-law.

The street is lined with estates built in the 1920s and ’30s. Its distinctive houses designed by regionally prominent architects in a wide range of popular revival styles (Greek, Italian Renaissance, Spanish Mission) are a visual encyclopedia of early 20th-century residential architecture. Walrow is a local landmark example of the Tudor Revival style, inspired by medieval architecture as popularized by the English Arts and Crafts Movement in the mid-19th century. Completed in 1925, Walrow was designed by Irven McDaniel of the firm Sieg and McDaniel, which had offices in Hot Springs and Memphis. The house name was derived from the surnames of the original owners, Kathryn Walter and her husband, A.K. Burrow.

Walrow is an elegant but restrained asymmetrical composition, with Indiana limestone walls, wide banks of windows, and a steep, complex slate roof with multiple hips and gables. Its main entry is accentuated by an oriel window positioned above the front door. The house has a broad facade and is one room deep across much of its width, a design which provided good cross-ventilation and superb natural light throughout the house. Its 50-plus leaded-glass windows have small stained-glass panels featuring various heraldic motifs. Many of the rooms have windows on three sides and most windows frame garden vistas. Walrow’s four-acre, park-like setting is screened by mature trees and embellished with specimen trees, numerous dogwoods, and hundreds of azaleas.

The house is an example of an important development in residential-space planning. During the 19th century, houses usually had single-use rooms linked by hallways. Walrow shows the new preference for open plans, with rooms arranged en filade (in a string), connected by large openings. At Walrow, several pairs of French doors allow visual connection between rooms even when the doors are closed. The French doors have curved muntins, echoing the lines of the Tudor arches framing the doorways. The main stair in the entry hall has carved-oak newels with pendant acanthus leaves at each corner. Millwork throughout the house features elements derived from historic English, French, and Italian sources.

The major rooms on the first floor have intricate plaster moldings given individual treatments in each room. The sun room has painted panels depicting the gardens developed by the Burrows. On the rear of the house, an arcaded gallery leads from the breakfast and sun rooms to the porte cochère, which was probably the principle family entrance.

The kitchen is a pleasant blend of contemporary functionality and traditional styling, with several well-equipped work areas and ample cabinets and pantries. The kitchen flooring is slate, which was found stacked behind the garage, perhaps originally used on one of the garden paths. The rear entrance vestibule has a glass-front china cupboard and temperature-controlled wine storage.

The second floor has two major suites flanking a library at the top of the main stair. The master suite includes a bedroom with a wood-burning fireplace, bath, dressing room, and study. The bedroom opens to a roof terrace above the gallery and porte cochère. The secondary suite consists of two bedrooms and a bath with all its original finishes and fixtures, including a “luminous radiator,” a heater powered by large, frosted light bulbs. The attic has a fourth bedroom and a full bath with a claw-foot tub and a distinctive vanity fashioned from an antique dresser.

Walrow is a splendid example of early 20th-century American domestic architecture on a grand scale, meticulously preserved and ready to provide the setting for another century of elegant living.

The bungalow became popular in America roughly 100 years ago when we started borrowing styles willy-nilly and grafting them onto whatever floor plan we were building. Bungalows and four-squares were built all over North, South, and Midtown Memphis and dressed up to look Queen Anne, Colonial, Mission, or Craftsman. Americans like to act purebred, but look at our culinary heritage or our houses and you’ll clearly discern the melting pot.

Check out the influence here. The bungalow was essentially a medieval English floor plan reduced in size because all the serfs wanted their own chateau-ettes. The Brothers Greene in California popularized bungalows in Pasadena around 1900. They used multiple windows for good ventilation and rustic, exterior finishes like stone and wood shingles to promote a less formal, easy-living theme. The style caught on and moved east from there.

This house, typical of the breed, has an informally placed, off-center entry. The large glass door with sidelights and transom is a Colonial Revival detail. Narrow wood siding covers the ground floor, and patterned cedar shakes fill the front gable. All this, amazingly, works together.

Inside follows suit, even with a recent overhaul. The ground floor has original heart-pine floors and high ceilings. Lots of recessed lights have been added. The kitchen has been opened up and features a new layout with a large island. Lots of windows open up this room to a private rear yard and two-level deck.

There’s a bedroom down (or a perfect home office, guest room). The public bath is made sumptuous by a slate floor, a footed soaking tub, and a large shower. A new fireplace opens into both the dining room and the den. Pretty cozy.

Upstairs is bigger than you’d think. Amazingly, there are three bedrooms, two baths, and a playroom — and the rooms aren’t small. The master suite is across the back. One side is the bedroom, the other a bath right out of a new development in Collierville. There’s a double vanity, a large jet tub, and another separate shower. Connected to this bath is the dressing room.

The public bath upstairs, like down, has a slate floor and bead-board wainscoting painted glossy white. Conveniently, there are two pedestal sinks and a connecting laundry room. Toward the front on both sides are bedrooms, each with a walk-in closet. All of the bedrooms and the hall have oak floors, rather posh for the second floor of a bungalow. Only the front playroom, overlooking the recently landscaped front yard, has been carpeted, and what better material for the rugrats anyway?

If you’re hunting for a recent Midtown renovation that’s got all the bells and whistles, this may be it. Although the front may look like a well-maintained old biddy, the insides have had a face-lift that makes this sweetheart into quite the thoroughly modern Millie.

2090 Cowden Ave.

3,100 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 3 baths; $325,000

Realtor: Crye-Leike, 276-8800, Agent: Les Frazier, 272-9090

Memphis has an abundance of fine Craftsman houses, but not all of them are the bungalows and four-squares that are emblematic of the style. The Craftsman cottage was also important. In his influential book, Craftsman Homes, published in 1909, Gustav Stickley showed many cottage designs, including “A Small Cottage that is Comfortable, Attractive and Inexpensive” and “A Pleasant and Homelike Cottage Designed for a Small Family.” Until the 1930s, most popular magazines and home-design books regularly featured plans such as “The Perfect Little Maidless House.”

This cottage in the Central Gardens Historic District has elements typical of the Craftsman style — simple linear detailing of the architecture, a low-pitched gable roof with a deep overhang, robust brackets supporting a gabled entrance canopy — but its nearly symmetrical facade and center chimney give the house some strong Colonial Revival overtones made even stronger by its white exterior. The blend of styles is not surprising on this house built in 1927, since by the mid-1920s the Colonial Revival had eclipsed the Craftsman in popularity. New exterior colors in an earthy palette of sage greens, autumnal golds, or terra cotta would accentuate the Craftsman heritage of the house.

The house originally had only four rooms, but it has been modified and expanded over the years. The living and dining rooms are on the front, separated by a fireplace. The chimney breast has been stripped of its mantel and plaster, revealing rough brickwork which has been painted. Restoring the wall finish and mantel and adding a cabinet or bookcase next to the fireplace could provide the sum of details usually found in Craftsman interiors. The surprisingly large bedroom also has a fireplace. An enclosed side porch and a large back addition enlarged the bedroom, giving it a full bath and a seating or home-office area. With a door added for privacy, the dining room could be a second bedroom or study. The original full bath is at the end of the hall between the dining room and kitchen.

The rear addition more than doubled the original size of the kitchen. The bright, airy space is twice as long as it is wide and has a cathedral ceiling with exposed beams and a clerestory window in its gable end. Storage, food preparation, and laundry areas are concentrated on one end along with a breakfast bar that could also be a handy place for folding laundry. The other end of the kitchen could be a cozy den or dining area.

The Arts and Crafts movement popularized the concept of the house and garden as a unified whole, and outdoor living spaces were a major component of Craftsman design. Rather than having a yard or lawn, a Craftsman house had a garden that was treated as an outside room or a series of rooms, each with a different character and plantings. Stickley’s Craftsman Homes includes a chapter titled, “Porches, Pergolas, and Terraces: The Charm of Living Out of Doors.” True to the Craftsman ideal, a brick-paved garden terrace fills the entire south side of this lot. French doors from the dining room and a single door from the kitchen open to the garden, which is enclosed by brick wall. A wrought-iron archway leads to the front yard; adding a garden gate would make this a truly private enclave. A driveway and detached garage fill the north side of the lot. In its own small way, this cottage is a stellar example of Stickley’s ideal “pleasant and homelike cottage.”

204 South Willett Street

1,300 square feet

1-2 bedrooms, 2 baths

$159,900

FSBO, 351-5588

Memphis’ downtown residential renaissance is being fueled by developments ranging from mansions along the bluff to apartments and condos “above the store.” Former hotels, department stores, and warehouses have been converted to housing. One of these is the former Livermore Iron Store Warehouse, with 13 recently completed apartments on its third floor.

The warehouse was built in 1905 on a site with access to the Mississippi and Tennessee Railroad, which ran along Tennessee Street. When the Illinois Central Railroad purchased the rail line in 1898, the Livermore Iron Foundry greatly expanded its markets to new areas served by the giant railroad. Memphis had a major iron-foundry industry at the turn of the 20th century; this warehouse in the South Bluffs Warehouse Historic District is the last extant building associated with the Livermore Foundry.

The warehouse was originally a two-story brick-and-timber building. A third floor was added around 1925, and a large clerestory was built to get natural light to the center of the interior. An exterior steel-frame stair and elevator core were added in 1981 when the building was remodeled for use as offices for Contemporary Media, publisher of Memphis magazine and The Memphis Flyer.

The building’s industrial appearance has been enhanced by a distinctive but restrained polychrome exterior color treatment. The third floor is a different color from the first two floors, hinting that it was an addition — a successful contemporary use of architecture parlante (narrative architecture), which tells the purpose or character of a building, a design device popularized in the 18th century.

The main entrance to the apartments is a pair of monumental cypress-and-glass-paneled doors salvaged in New Orleans. Similar antique Italianate doors with solid panels are used at the entrance to each apartment. The corridor leading to the apartments is a circuitous space that waltzes through the building, many of its corners softened by large-radius curves that also form interesting spaces inside the apartments. The hall is bathed in softly diffused light from wall sconces and tiny skylights that look like ceiling light fixtures. Light also pours in from the clerestory high above the central atrium.

Each apartment has a different floor plan, but all have enormous kitchens open to the living and dining area, acres of counter space, pantries, ceiling fans, and intriguing Italian washer/dryer units. The oak cabinetry has a white pickled finish which reinforces the airy tone of the spaces.

Bathrooms throughout are large and lavish; most have big showers and separate tubs. Many have enough room for a chair or free-standing cabinet. In the one-bedroom units, the bath is usually accessible from the hallway and the bedroom. Every unit has several large closets and storage areas; some have walk-in closets that are about the size of a studio apartment.

The new interior walls are smooth and white, boldly contrasting with the exposed brick perimeter walls, heavy timber columns, and concrete floors. The board ceilings and exposed ductwork are also painted white. Broad banks of windows provide fabulous light, and all but two units have a river view. Because of the depth of the warehouse, a few rooms do not have a direct outside view, but they have glazed French doors or glass-block walls which borrow light from an adjoining room or the atrium. All of the doors are seven feet tall, a detail that accentuates the 12-foot-ceiling height. Now known as the Tennessee Street Apartments, this former warehouse is enjoying new life in ways that would have surprised its original builders.

Tennessee Street Apartments

460 Tennessee Street

13 apartments, 925-1,750 square feet, 1 bedroom/1 bath to 2 bedrooms/2 baths

$950-$1,900 per month

The Paperworks condominiums are an important element in the reemergence of
downtown as a residential community. The former D. Canale warehouse and Tayloe
Paper Company in the South Bluff Warehouse Historic District was adapted for
use as apartments in the 1980s, a bold decision at a time when downtown had
only a couple thousand residents. The apartments are now being converted to
condominiums.

The site has been through several significant development phases in the
past 150 years. It was part of the vast Fort Pickering complex developed by
Union troops beginning in 1862. After the war, the area became a fashionable
residential district extending along Front Street from Beale to Calhoun. When
the Frisco Railroad Bridge was completed in 1892, the South Bluffs became a
bustling retail, wholesale, and warehouse center.

D. Canale & Company was one of several grocery and liquor businesses
started by Italian immigrants in Memphis just after the Civil War. In business
downtown for nearly 50 years, Canale moved to the South Bluffs when it became
a solely wholesale operation. The Canale building on the corner of South Front
Street and Huling Avenue was completed in 1913, the same year Central Station
opened a couple of blocks away on South Main.

The new Canale warehouse was architecturally distinctive, even avant-
garde. Although concrete post-and-beam framing with brick infill was fairly
common for industrial and commercial buildings by 1900, the design of the
Canale building made no attempt to wrap the building with an ornamental skin
of some appropriated historical style. Instead, its structural system was
expressed inside and out, with its only ornamentation the horizontal and
vertical concrete elements, brick panels, and bands of windows. At a time when
neoclassicism and remnants of Victorian excess were all the rage, most people
probably considered the stark building to be purely utilitarian, not really
architecture at all. But bare-bones, minimalist structures such as this were
the genesis of the modern movement and the International Style, which
characterized American and European high-style architecture in the first half
of the 20th century.

The five-story Paperworks building now has offices on the ground floor
and 65 residential units above. Complementing the building’s original design,
the present renovations are minimalist treatments that make no attempt at a
“retro” or pseudo-historical look. In the lobby, the mail boxes are
screened by a diaphanous curve of frosted glass, and a small, Zen-inspired
garden has been installed at the base of the building’s light well near the
elevator.

The seven floor plans all have a kitchen-bath-storage core and a laundry
room. In some units, the kitchen is near the entry; in others, it is near the
center. All of the units have “open” floor plans, with spaces
undifferentiated by walls, a concept offering almost endless space usage and
furniture arrangements. The exposed-brick panels and glazed concrete floors
make a surprisingly nesutral background for antiques as well as contemporary
furniture and classic modern pieces.

These condominiums in the middle of the thriving South Main arts district
aren’t just urban lofts — they’re urbane environments.

408 South Front Street

65 loft units, 700-1,400 square feet

$83,500-$209,000

Henry Turley Realtors, Agents: Annette Sharp and Lori Sharp, 521-1593

This one fools you. It looks small and dark at first glance. It’s neither. A close look and you will notice low windows on the right front as the land slopes off. Over 1,000 square feet of this house open onto a grade at the rear. It doesn’t count for appraisal purposes because Memphis is flat, so this space just doesn’t exist. Ever read the novel Catch-22?

Anyway, it’s not small. On the main floor there are four bedrooms and three baths. One of the bedrooms is more nursery (or home office) size, but two qualify as master, with large private baths and lots of closets.

Now about that dark impression: There are lots of trees in the front yard. They’re large, healthy, and on the south side of the house. You can cut them all down. You’d get more sunshine, the grass would need mowing more often, and you’d pay a higher utility bill. You figure it out.

There’s a cathedral-ceilinged sun room on the rear that’s all glass on three sides. You can’t see it from the street. It is completely private and designed and built by the architect Zeno Yates to be cool in the summer and keep toasty in the winter with a high-efficiency, European-style stove. It’s about as bright a room as you can get, but there’s no central heat and air out there, so, for appraisal purposes, it doesn’t exist either. Joseph Heller would have loved this.

The kitchen and den run across the rear behind the open living and dining area. The layout’s a bit dated, but there’s space to open up the kitchen and den and even take in the dining area as a keeping room. The original living room, where the plastic-covered furniture and lamps were displayed, could be a grand dining room. That’s a really good use for a formal living room no one dares enter anymore.

The kitchen and den are a bit dark from the solid-wood pine cabinets in the kitchen and paneling in the den. Some judicious removal of walls and a little paint could do wonders here. The original oak floors are lightly stained and in wonderful condition. There are fireplaces in both the living room and the den. Good stuff to work with.

Downstairs, in the rooms that don’t exist, are a large playroom, a study with one wall covered in antique, glass-fronted bookcases (floor to ceiling!), a spacious laundry, a workshop, and a billiard room. The billiard room has a bar, a broken-tile floor, and a wall of glass out to the backyard.

There is also a large deck over a rear, double carport. The deck has built-in seating on three sides and looks out to a yard with specimen plantings that need but a little TLC. There is an arbor covered with grapes, a rear privacy screening of pines, and one of the largest Chinese Loropetalums in town. A little creativity is called for here, but the structure of both house and yard suggests this could be a stunner, at least, in this writer’s novel appraisal.

4940 Shady Grove Rd.

2,700 square feet; 4 bedrooms, 3 baths; $295,000

Realtor: Sowell & Company, 278-4380

Agent: Gwyn Guess, 327-3508

The East Buntyn Historic District, near the University of Memphis, was once part of a cotton plantation, a quarter of which awarded to Geraldus Buntyn for his service in the War of 1812. After Buntyn’s death, developers registered the Buntyn Subdivision with the county tax office in 1868. Several new streets were installed in the early 1900s, but major construction didn’t begin until the 1920s, after city utilities had been extended to the subdivision. Many prospective residents were attracted to the area by its proximity to the Memphis Country Club, which had purchased Buntyn’s Greek Revival house and rebuilt on the same site after the house burned in 1910. The Normal School, the state teachers’ college, was also in the neighborhood.

This house, built around 1925, started out as a yellow-brick, Mission-style, “airplane” bungalow facing Reese Street and set far back. In the 1950s, the large lot was subdivided and a new house was built in the original front yard. The existing house was substantially altered inside and out, no doubt in an effort to “modernize” it and create a more open plan in keeping with popular architectural trends of the time. The main axis of the house shifted 90 degrees: The entrance moved from the narrow Reese Street façade to the long side on Southern Avenue. Shifting the entrance allowed major interior changes. The house’s typical bungalow plan — entry/living room, dining room, and kitchen running from front to back along one side with a central hall, bedrooms, and bath on the other side — was transformed into a ranch-house plan, the dominant residential style of the 1950s and ’60s, with its living and dining rooms and kitchen in the front and bedrooms and bath in the back. The original living room became a pine-paneled den with a big brick fireplace; a wall was removed between the original dining and breakfast rooms to create a combined living and dining room. The front and side porches were paved with yellow bricks removed from the first-floor parapet wall. At some time, the house was painted white, giving it a capital-M Modern (bordering on International style) appearance.

The second-floor “airplane” (given that name presumably because it has a panoramic view) has two bedrooms, each with high windows on three sides and a deep closet, which could be reconfigured to make room for at least a half bath.

The kitchen is big, with varnished wood cabinets, a pantry, room for a table and chairs, and the same hardwood floors as in the adjacent rooms. The kitchen could be easily updated a bit by recessing the refrigerator in the pantry, painting the cabinets, and replacing the table and chairs with a big work island with seating along one side.

Calling the ground floor of this house a basement doesn’t do it justice. It’s a full, walk-out basement, the same size as the first floor, and has several rooms, a master-quality bath and dressing room, and a laundry in a vast walk-in closet. Installing French doors to connect the area with the rear garden would make this an especially appealing part of the house.

Whether you’re looking for a move-in ready ’50s-chic house or feel like restoring some of the Craftsman bungalow elements, this house offers lots of livability and myriad arrangements and uses for its many capacious rooms.

3342 Southern Avenue

1,900 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 2 baths; $114,000

Heritage Homes Co., Jennifer Parker, agent, 755-2000, 452-8061

Shotgun houses have been hot for a while. In New Orleans they’re highly prized as the first-time home-buyer’s best option. Because they’re small, they’re usually the most affordable home available. Being freestanding, they offer more light and air than most apartments, and you often get a very manageable little yard in the deal.

In Memphis we’re not blessed with the same quantity of shotguns as New Orleans, although, historically, we may have had as many. Our city government believes every first-time home-buyer deserves at least two or three bedrooms. It’s obvious our replacement-home policy is blind to the national trend of smaller households and the growing single-homeowner market. So here shotguns are often bulldozed as “obsolete.” Such a short-sighted policy only makes the remaining few more dear.

In Midtown shotgun houses are mostly found within a few blocks of South Cooper, either in Idlewild or Cooper-Young. More stand in older sections of North and South Memphis unrenovated, but with our current housing policy they’re probably headed for the landfill. This shotgun is on a quiet, dead-end street off Central Avenue. It is adjacent to another that’s practically its twin. The two, both recently renovated, are a treat and only make you wish for more.

The shotgun plan, though simple, is supremely adaptable, as demonstrated here. The kitchen was relocated from the rear to the front of the house. It’s delightfully disarming to walk in from the front porch and immediately be in the center of activity.

The fact that this kitchen isn’t shabby makes it quite welcoming. Countertops are thick Venetian gold granite. A narrow granite shelf atop the backsplash adds extra storage for often-used items like condiments and coffee mugs. A center island not only increases the workspace substantially but doubles as dining for intimate parties.

The second room has its original oak mantel, which has been stripped to the wood and still features its beveled mirror above. The fireplace surround and hearth have creamy Italian travertine stone that adds a subtle touch of elegance to this multifunctional gathering room.

The bedroom was relocated to the rear fourth room for maximum privacy. It includes an area that had been the back porch, so part of its ceiling slopes down from the house’s standard 10-foot height. In addition to the slope, the ceiling in this room is all tongue-and-groove wood, and together they add a very distinctive, historical character. The bedroom opens out to a deck and a privacy-fenced backyard. There’s even a separate studio building out back with its own inviting covered entry.

The third room was divided up to create a hall (large enough to accommodate a home office), a utility closet, and a spacious bathroom. The bath follows the elegant lead set by the kitchen with tumbled, black marble floors, creamy subway tile at the tub/shower, and a custom-built vanity. The vanity is made of a turned-leg table base with a top of black granite into which the bowl was cut. Most houses twice this price don’t have half the level of elegant finish materials, and that’s what makes this shotgun smokin’!

685 New York Street

750 square feet, 1 bedroom, 1 bath; $99,500

For sale by owner, Steve Webb, 351-0900