When the people who work for the Utah Heritage Foundation see a building that has been lovingly restored, they invite the owner to apply for an award. "Tell us the story of your project," they ask.
Kirk Huffaker, assistant director of UHF, says some of the people they approach are excited and others are shy. Some say, "Oh no, I didn't do anything special. I just worked on my house because I love it."
"But we can put it in perspective," Huffaker says. The Heritage folks know what is happening around the state. "We know about a lot of projects and we know when someone has done a good job. We can single out a couple of buildings and hold them up as models."
For 2005, the UHF held up as models and gave awards to three individuals, one community group, two homes and four commercial buildings.
Ask Huffaker to take this "perspective" idea one step further. Ask him to compare Utah's preservation efforts with those of other states. Huffaker will say he doesn't know a lot about other states. But he does have one example that makes Utah look pretty good.
Neighbors in the Yalecrest area of Salt Lake City recently were instrumental in getting a city ordinance passed to limit the size of new or remodeled homes. Huffaker says this shows how smart Utahns are. In other cities, like Denver or Dallas, dozens of too-large homes get built in historic neighborhoods, while residents sit around and agonize. Huffaker is happy to report it took only two or three oversize homes in Salt Lake before people started talking to their City Council members and drafting new rules.
If you live in Utah and are considering restoring an old building, the Heritage Foundation can help. In addition to education and awards programs, the UHF offers technical assistance and loans.
Huffaker says they have a lot of latitude in granting those loans. So don't worry that you might end up tiptoeing around in a museum, Huffaker says. You can preserve and still be comfortable in the space.
"You need latitude in order to adapt an older building to function for today," he notes. "That latitude allows you to keep some of the older elements, so that you have a really unique building, but still have some modern elements — to have high energy efficiency and function as a modern structure. That is really the essence of historic preservation today."
Peter Goss, who teaches architecture at the University of Utah, was one of those who nominated Gary Parnell for the 2005 individual award from the Utah Heritage Foundation.
Parnell lives in Spring City, Sanpete County, and teaches English at Snow College. Because Goss and his wife own a home in Spring City (as well as in Salt Lake City), Goss had a chance to observe how hard Parnell has worked for preservation.
Parnell helped save the town's old school. He lives in a historic home himself. And, Goss adds, because Parnell serves on the Spring City City Council, "He has convinced other people about the value of preservation."
If you talk to Parnell, he will become quite enthusiastic about the ongoing restoration at the old school. He'll talk about the beams and the bolts. He'll talk about the annual art show and how it raises more money every year. He'll talk about how, when you have a building where the original bathrooms were outside, it presents certain challenges in maintaining a historic appearance while installing new plumbing.
He'll describe how he wrote grants and got money to restore the school.
Parnell spends so much time on these projects because he loves history. "I like the old styles. I like antiques. I'm getting pretty old myself," he says. "I would like to be preserved, myself."
Her home is just not functional, Mollie Kimball says. Not for most people, anyway. It has just one bedroom. It has a galley kitchen, with space for only a half-size fridge.
Also, it is made of glass. So it is cold in the winter.
It is just not functional, Kimball will reiterate if you go to visit her.
And yet, when the sun is shining and the glass is clean, living in her house is like living inside a gem. "It just shines. It sparkles," Kimball says. Here, she is surrounded by trees. Here, she lives the way she wants to live.
The home was built in 1955. Architect John Sugden constructed it for his mother, Roberta. Later, on another part of the property, he added a small studio for himself.
As for Kimball, she had raised her family in an architect-designed home in Mount Olympus Cove. She had moved to a condominium but found she missed the yard work. It kept her fit.
So, about 12 years ago, Kimball started looking for another house. She remembered having been inside the Sugden home and she called John Sugden and offered to buy the house. As she recalls, Sugden told her the house was not energy efficient and tried to talk her out of loving it — but eventually he sold it to her.
Kimball knew Sugden had lived in the Midwest, studying and working with architect Mies van der Rohe. (Van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, which looks a lot like the Sugden home except that it is set on flat land along a river in Illinois, was recently purchased by the National Historic Trust.)
Kimball knew of the Farnsworth House, and knew what her house was designed to look like. Slowly, she set about restoring it.
She took down the drapes that covered every window. She tore out shrubbery that obscured the home's clean lines.
Deciding what to do with the floor was the hardest part, she says. The original concrete floor had been covered with white carpet and the concrete had been marred in the process. Kimball reluctantly decided the floor was not worth refinishing and then she had to think about what to cover it with.
She eventually settled on a black industrial carpet. She loves its practicality, she says. "Water, dirt, mud, ski
boots . . . " No problem.
Kimball could have put in new windows, double or triple-paned. However, in order to meet modern building codes, she could not have used floor-to-ceiling sheets of glass. She decided she didn't want to break up the expanses Sugden had created.
Kimball knows she made decisions that other people would not have made. She kept the galley kitchen, for example.
The kitchen runs along a central wall and it had not been updated. It still had the original metal cabinets, a tiny under-the-counter fridge and steel counters with stove burners built in. The previous owner had added a full-size fridge at the end of the galley, blocking the sunlight and creating a wall where, originally, there had been only windows.
Kimball could have ripped out some cabinets to make room for a full-size fridge, but she didn't. Nor did she put her fridge against the windows. Instead, she placed her fridge around the corner, in a closet.
She has to walk a few more steps to grab some lettuce or some milk. But Kimball doesn't care. She is only glad that now, once again, her home is open to every last inch of sky and sun.
There isn't a building in Utah with a more colorful past than the C. C. Keller Building on the corner of Lincoln and 25th Street in Ogden. Anyway, that's what the owner, Bruce Edwards, has come to believe. Edwards likes to talk about the old days, when the main floor of the building was the El Borracho Tavern — famous for stabbings and shootings — and the upstairs was a brothel called The Rose Rooms.
For several years the television series "Everwood" has used the exterior of the Keller Building as a backdrop.
Meanwhile, if you walk through the doors of the Keller Building now, you enter a place that evokes another era. Mary Gaskill rents the space from Edwards for a shop called "Trends &Traditions." She carries soaps and silver and ribbons and reproductions of antiques, all arranged in an artful jumble.
What she and Edwards have done to the inside of this 100-year-old commercial building illustrates the latitude available in historic restoration.
The brick is original. The windows are not — because the original building presented a blank wall to the street. The radiators are original, only they aren't heating the rooms anymore. Edwards installed a new furnace. The radiators have been shined up and lined up, and now they frame the stairwell.
Because there were no windows in the first place, Edwards and Gaskill got to decide what to use to create the interior window ledges. They chose a rough concrete. Then they stained it with random splotches of basil and cumin and spray-on glue. "Looks like the mold is growing," says Gaskill.
As Edwards shows people around, he likes to say, "There were probably more people murdered in this building than any other place in Utah."
Gaskill prefers to talk about the owners of The Rose Rooms, Rossette Duccinni Davie and her husband, Bill. The couple owned four brothels in Ogden during the 1940s and early '50s. Rose was a familiar character, one that a lot of old-timers remember, Gaskill says. Rose owned a pink Cadillac and also an ocelot, which she liked to take for walks on a leash.
Gaskill has printed up fliers to share the Davies' history with her customers. Occasionally, Gaskill will also pull out photos of the Davies. Bill Davie has a trim little mustache. Rose Davie is pretty, with Rita Hayworth hair. Gaskill sought to honor Davie's pizzazz when she hired an artist to paint a rose on the wall inside the store.
You can have a lot of fun inside an historic building, Gaskill believes. You can highlight whatever you want to highlight. You can play with the place. Sprinkle it with basil. Add windows — or not.
The Heritage Award winners would agree with her. When you work on your building, you can find your own balance. You can live surrounded by beauty, with just the amount of convenience you decide you need.
E-mail: susan@desnews.com