Category: Real Estate

This traditional-style house was built just under 20 years ago. The owners designed and collected the custom elements that give it so much character. It has a double-gallery front porch of the kind often found on a Carolina Low Country or Gulf Coast house.

The interior is smartly laid out. On the ground floor, only the library and the dining room face the street. The living room, kitchen/keeping room, and sun room run across the rear with its 65-foot-long private deck. The street is not noisy but rather a quiet cul de sac that runs south of Walnut Grove, just east of Germantown Parkway.

The rear yard is filled with large oaks and under-story plantings of azaleas, viburnums, and dogwoods for visual interest and privacy.

The majority of the flooring on the public level is narrow quarter-sawn oak, as you would expect in a traditional house. For variety, wonderful old brick floors were installed in the library, mud room, powder room, laundry, and sun room. Other custom touches include beveled, leaded glass at the entry door and its sidelights and in transoms above the dining room doorways. Hand-painted Dutch tiles ornament the living room fireplace surround.

The entry hall has a wall of illuminated niches opposite the staircase for displaying pottery, sculpture, and other objets d’art. Recessed wall washers are well positioned to accent hanging artworks. Lincrusta, a heavily embossed wallpaper, is used for textural emphasis on the library ceiling and as a border in the dining room and kitchen. A butler’s pantry provides some separation between the kitchen and dining room as well as a useful service area.

The kitchen is immense. There is a functional ell of perimeter cabinetry, but the central 10-by-4-foot island is clearly the pièce de résistance, where friends and family can all gather. The wall opposite the island is brick, with a large recess for display. A small room that originally was an aviary now plays host to pets when the owners are away and to plants in the winter.

Front and rear staircases make for easy circulation inside. Upstairs are four bedrooms, two baths, and a bonus room over the two-car garage. The master suite is on the rear and has a working fireplace stacked above the one in the living room. There is a separate staircase to the attic.

Not only is this house well- planned, with many distinctive architectural features, it was built to modern energy efficiency standards, too. The walls both inside and out were built with 2-by-6 framing. This allowed more insulation to be installed on the perimeter, and the owners added insulation between the floors as well. There are four central mechanical systems, so it’s really easy to zone the utilities in this custom Colonial.

65 Timber View Cove, Cordova,

4 bedrooms, 2 1/2 baths

4,700 sq. ft.

$294,000

Realtor: Crye-Leike, 754-0800

Agent: Joan Jenkins, 359-6226

1910 was the heyday of the Colonial Revival. The 1876 centennial of America’s independence and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of some Caribbean Islands) awakened interest in the early architecture of the colonists.

As a result of these two celebrations, architects began attempting more detailed interpretations of houses built along the Atlantic coast by the first English settlers.

This house in Central Gardens, built in that first decade of the 20th century, is a copy of the Massachusetts pavilion at the 1893 exposition, which was based on the architects Peabody and Stearns’ interpretation of John Hancock’s Georgian house on Beacon Hill in Boston. In his book, Memphis, an Architectural Guide, Eugene Johnson called the house “the finest Colonial Revival structure in the city.”

This grand house has been meticulously maintained by the same family for the last 83 years. It has a monumental street facade, with a roof punctuated by four carefully executed dormers and a front pedimented gable with an elegant fanlight high above the entry.

The large corner property is surrounded by a brick wall topped by a wooden balustrade, with dense hedges behind. But the house’s real charms are mostly hidden.

Once inside the gate, there is an enormous lawn on the one-and-a-third-acre lot. Besides the residence, there are a playhouse, a two-car garage with attached guest quarters, and a flagstone patio under a shady canopy. Out of sight are a fenced service yard with a covered potting bench, a storage cottage, and, tucked well back, a secret playground.

The interior does not disappoint. The rooms are as splendid as you might expect, and the detailing is exquisite. The entry hall is terminated by a paneled staircase that rises through all three floors.

The living and dining rooms have extraordinary original lights that remain with the house. The library is all oak paneling imported from England. The house has enough bookcases to hold 6,000 books or a lot of doodads, or both, for that matter.

The kitchen is the room that would benefit from an update. The space is large and the layout efficient, but white marble counters over painted cabinets, a peninsula or an island, and new lighting couldn’t hurt.

The second floor has five bedrooms, three baths, and a sitting room. The closets have more built-ins than you can imagine. And several master-suite options come readily to mind. The third floor has another two bedrooms and attic to spare.

This is obviously a well-loved family home, now inhabited by the fourth generation of the same clan. It can easily accommodate siblings, maiden aunts, and third cousins twice-removed. Although it’s large and definitely high style, it’s got a casual graciousness that suggests a rambling country estate — right in the heart of Midtown.

1785 Harbert Avenue

6,500 square feet

7 bedrooms, 4 baths

$995,000

Realtor: Coleman Etter Fontaine, 767-4100

Agent: Jean Coors Arthur, 634-2800

The ranch house is once again in high favor among house hunters. The style caught on in the prosperous decade after WWII, when affordable automobiles replaced buses for passenger transportation. You can tell ranch houses were not designed for inner-city or early suburban neighborhoods, because they are sited with their longest side facing the street and require much broader lots than a Victorian cottage, a shotgun, a bungalow, or a four-square.

Their benefits often are overlooked, especially now that the price of gas makes returning to the inner city to find a more walkable, less car-dependent way of living a compelling option. Ranch-house subdivisions are found outside the inner city and beyond the early streetcar suburbs where diverse commercial development is well established.

This house, one block from the Memphis Racquet Club, enjoys all that the Sanderlin area has to offer. Within walking distance are restaurants, movies, groceries, and tons of services. You might have to jump in the gas-guzzler because you’ve got more distant errands to run, but then, so do folks in Midtown.

Most mid-century suburbs have large lots, as here, with more yard in front of the house than out back. It seems like a lot of grass to mow, but if you hanker for a pool or maybe a garden, it’s easy to accommodate. The capacious carport could be turned into a grand front porch with parking for three cars off to the side. The backyard could easily become a courtyard with dense landscaping around a watery oasis. And some clever screening with hedges would allow parts of the front yard to be a secluded play area or vegetable garden.

Like most ranches, this house is one story. The open floor plan championed by Frank Lloyd Wright influences these houses so that dining rooms are often set in an ell off the kitchen, as here, which makes the public spaces feel larger and allows for easy entertaining. This would be a great house to showcase a modern furniture collection. Recessed lighting to accentuate art would be easy to install, since it’s all attic above.

The house has had many updates during the current owners’ tenure. The high ribbon windows all have new thermal, low-E glass. They provide lots of good light while maintaining maximal privacy. They make furniture placement easier, too. The deep roof overhangs also guarantee a shady interior during the summer.

The kitchen has natural maple cabinets and a large stone-like ceramic floor, as does the adjoining breakfast room or seating area. A built-in banquette would work well here.

The living room, dining room, and four bedrooms have their original quarter-sawn oak flooring, although it has been freshly protected with new wall-to-wall carpeting in all the bedrooms.

Closets are plentiful. The laundry area has a large closet opposite it for general storage. A rear addition, currently used as a media room, has two closets with built-ins and would also make a perfect master suite with an attached office or sitting room.

This is an easy house to live in and centrally located within the Shady Grove Elementary and White Station High School districts.

Green Acres is the place to be if you would like a mid-century home that offers the same convenience as oft-touted Midtown neighborhoods.

420 Green Acres Road

1,900 square feet

4 bedroom, 2 baths

$189,000

Realtor: Kendall Haney, 725-1968

Agent: Lisa Buckner, 246-5433

The 1870s weren’t a great decade for Memphis. A series of yellow fever epidemics caused the people who survived to flee the city. By 1879, Memphis was bankrupt and lost its city charter, not to be regained until 1891.

The surrounding countryside was where the action was in this decade. The Memphis and Charleston Railroad made the properties along Southern Avenue desirable. There were numerous stations between Buntyn and downtown served by a local train known as the “Accommodation Line.”

The first road through the area now known as Lenox was Cooper Street, running north from the rail line. Just north of the Cooper-Young area, Thomas F. Lenox bought land to farm and built a house for his family in the mid-1870s.

Amazingly, Lenox’s gable-and-wing Italianate cottage is still standing. Its original entry hall is 10 feet wide and runs, much like the entry to the Hunt-Phelan House (1828), from the front to the rear porches. This layout and the 13-foot ceilings would exhaust the summer heat. This hall at some stage was considered a waste, maybe when central heat was added, and was divided up with the current kitchen installed in the rear half.

The original public rooms are along the west side of the house. There is a parlor with a spectacular bay window and a separate dining room connected by a finely detailed Gothic archway. The kitchen would probably be better located behind the dining room. A pantry now holds the laundry, but it is big enough to also hold the main bath. That would allow the existing bath on the back porch to be enlarged as a sunroom or breakfast area.

The east side holds two bedrooms, one with an attached bath. This rear bedroom and bath, which has the other bay window in the house, would make the perfect master suite, having already had a whole wall of closets added. The front bedroom would benefit from a similar addition of closets.

The front facade has much of its original architectural detail intact. The front windows are all tall, narrow, and arch-headed. Above the bay, the gable has multiple brackets supporting the roof cornice and a decoratively sawn attic vent. It appears that part of the front porch was enclosed and the original doors, still in place on the rear, were turned to access what was left of the front porch.

Sadly, that means you and guests are not under cover as you enter and don’t often get the pleasure of the original doors, with original screen doors, tall transom, and fancy, bracketed head moldings. Restoring this enlarged entry back to the front porch and re-centering the double doors on a reopened hall would recreate the original grandeur in and out.

Let’s not pretend there isn’t a lot of work needed here, but the original plan and the surviving details all suggest what a fine home this once was and could be again.

2175 Vinton Avenue

Approximately 2,300 square feet

2 bedrooms, 2 baths, $229,000

Realtor: Bob Neal, 685-7772

Even though America fought a revolution to be rid of foreign rule, this country has always had a love affair with all things European. In the 19th century, the wealthy went on the “Grand Tour” and often came back to build European-influenced houses. The Arts and Crafts movement that began in England in the 1860s was a big hit here, too, eventually encompassing a variety of styles, including revivals of English Tudor and Cotswold cottage originals.

World War I was, in many ways, the poor man’s version of the Grand Tour. Our boys’ exposure to European domestic architecture undoubtedly helped maintain the popularity of Eurostyle houses — no longer just grand country houses, but bungalows and cottages for common folk like you and me.

This house in Washington Heights, built in 1925, is a spacious duplex finished with wide moldings, fancy plasterwork, and two original boilers, allowing each unit — one up, one down — its own thermostat.

There are several original duplexes from this period on this block, and they were all designed to look like grand single-family houses and still do.

The front door to the upstairs unit is featured prominently to the left, under a gable roof with a parapet end wall. The ground-floor entry is tucked away on what looks like a side porch. The floor plans are practically identical, except the upper unit has an enclosed sunroom with two walls of casement windows and a terra-cotta floor above the ground floor’s open front porch.

The ground floor has just had both baths updated and a sparkling new kitchen installed. Upstairs had the same updates a few years earlier, along with recessed lights to accentuate art, a room full of bookshelves, and a wall of new closets in the master suite. There are also two central air-conditioning systems.

The living rooms are spacious, centered on fireplaces, and have triple diamond-paned windows looking out to the street. Walls and ceilings are rusticated with hand-troweled stucco accented by a subtle paint finish. A large cased opening connects living and dining areas.

Behind the dining room is a surprisingly big kitchen. All the cabinets have roll-out shelves. Appliances are new, and generous storage areas conceal pantry and laundry. Additional floor space here works either as a breakfast area, seating nook, or both, elevating these kitchens to “keeping room” status.

There are three bedrooms and two baths down the opposide side of each unit, with minor variations. Downstairs, the rear two bedrooms enjoy their original connecting door, allowing the middle bedroom to serve as a sitting room for the master or a nursery.

Upstairs, the front bedroom has two walls of bookcases, making it a possible library, but it still has a full bed wall, if only for a sleeper sofa. The master bedroom has its connection to the middle bedroom covered by a wall of closets that would make a shopaholic drool.

Most unexpectedly, there is a full deck on top of the two-car garage, with one half open and the other half roofed and screened. It’s got to be one of the best treehouses for dining in all of Midtown.

If the value of the euro has you thinking twice about a trip abroad, it might be wise to plan your Grand Tour of things romantically European right here in Washington Heights.

2225/2229 Jefferson Avenue

Approximately 4,120 square feet (total of both units)

Each unit: 3 bedrooms, 2 baths $455,000

FSBO: Nancy Willis, 483-4200

Even though America fought a revolution to be rid of foreign rule, this country has always had a love affair with all things European. In the 19th century, the wealthy went on the “Grand Tour” and often came back to build European-influenced houses. The Arts and Crafts movement that began in England in the 1860s was a big hit here, too, eventually encompassing a variety of styles, including revivals of English Tudor and Cotswold cottage originals. World War I was, in many ways, the poor man’s version of the Grand Tour. Our boys had fought beside the English, liberated the French, and tramped across much of Italy and Germany, and their exposure to European domestic architecture undoubtedly help maintain the popularity of Eurostyle houses — no longer just grand country houses, but bungalows and cottages built cheek-by-jowl in cities for common folk like you and me.

This house in Washington Heights, built in 1925, is a spacious duplex finished with wide moldings, fancy plaster work, and two original boilers, allowing each unit — one up, one down — its own thermostat. The separate heat systems were certainly not common when one boiler would easily serve both units, and radiators could just be adjusted room by room. There are several original duplexes from this same period on this block and they were all designed to look like grand single-family houses, and still do. The front door to the upstairs unit is featured prominently to the left, under a gable roof with a parapet end wall. The ground-floor entry is tucked away on what looks like a side porch. The floor plans are practically identical, except the upper unit has an enclosed sunroom with two walls of casement windows and a terra cotta floor above the ground floor’s open front porch.

The ground floor has just had both baths updated and a sparkling new kitchen installed. Upstairs had the same updates a few years earlier, along with recessed lights to accentuate art, a room full of book shelves, and a wall of new closets in the master suite. There are also two central air conditioning systems.

The living rooms are spacious, centered on fireplaces and have triple diamond-paned windows looking out to the street. Walls and ceilings are rusticated with hand-troweled stucco accented by a subtle paint finish. A large cased opening connects living and dining areas.

Behind the dining room is a surprisingly big kitchen. All the cabinets have roll-out shelves. Appliances are new, and generous storage areas conceal pantry and laundry. Additional floor space here works either as a breakfast area, seating nook, or both, elevating these kitchens to “keeping room” status.

There are three bedrooms and two baths down the opposide side of each unit, with minor variations. Downstairs, the rear two bedrooms enjoy their original connecting door, allowing the middle bedroom to serve as a sitting room for the master or a nursery. Upstairs, the front bedroom has two walls of bookcases, making it a possible library, but it still has a full bed wall, if only for a sleeper sofa. The master bedroom has its connection to the middle bedroom covered by a wall of closets that would make a shopaholic drool.

Most unexpectedly, there is a full deck on top of the two-car garage, with one half open and the other half roofed and screened. It’s got to be one of the best treehouses for dining in all of Midtown. If the value of the Euro has you thinking twice about a trip abroad, it might be wise to plan your Grand Tour of things romantically European right here in Washington Heights.

2225/2229 Jefferson Avenue

approximately 4120 square feet (total of both units);

each unit has 3 bedrooms, 2 baths; $455,000

FSBO: Nancy Willis 483-4200