After Ashland Park was designated a historic district, the Rouses’ new home will be the last the neighborhood will see
rousehouseTOP
When Mary and Arthur Rouse decided they were ready to leave the suburban Hartland neighborhood and move closer to the city’s center about eight years ago, they slowly whittled their ideal location down to the Ashland Park neighborhood, specifically Desha Road.
“This street, somehow or another, to me was just magic,” Arthur said. “We looked up the street just one block, and we were like, ‘Nah, that’s too far away.’
“We just got infatuated with this neighborhood. We thought it would be a great place to live, and whenever a place would pop up for sale, we would look at it. We looked at a couple on this street here, and one thing or another was not up to our liking – the time wasn’t right, the price, whatever it was.”
[gallery link="file" order="DESC" columns="4"]
At one time, they looked at an old Foursquare home built in the 1920s on the corner of Desha and Ghent roads, which through the years had fallen into considerable disrepair, the couple said. Still, the Rouses thought the price wasn’t quite right, but after the economic crash of 2008, Arthur said the owners were open to a lower offer, and the couple purchased the home three years ago.
Then the couple found themselves in a bit of a quandary: do they honor the home’s historical character by salvaging the structure, or do they take it to the ground and erect an entirely new home in its place.
They spoke with some architects who were “insistent” that the home could be saved, but ultimately, the couple decided that they wanted to tear the home down and have an open palette from which to work, which would allow them to utilize a number of energy efficient features, such as geothermal heating, Icynene foam insulation and aluminum clad double pane windows, which may or may not have been possible when retrofitting the old Foursquare.
“It was really important to us to be energy efficient,” Mary said.
After purchasing the home, the couple tore down the home quickly (and literally – Arthur said the the demolition contractor was “amenable” to letting him use the track hoe), which caused a bit of a scandal in the neighborhood, since homes being scraped away was a very rare occurrence in Ashland Park. Many neighbors were concerned about what was going to go up in place of the old house.
The Rouses were as sensitive as they could be to their future neighbors’ anxieties, though, and tried to reach out to people on a person-to-person basis and let them know that the home they were intending to build would be in keeping with the rest of the neighborhood’s character, only new.
“We really wanted to build something just like the neighborhood, just new,” Arthur said. “Although, we could have built a concrete block fourplex and stacked it up with students and start raking in the cash.”
The immediate neighborhood was marked with a number of bungalows, and that was the form the Rouses thought they would most like to emulate, at least on the outside.
“We were kind of hip on the idea of building a house that was an Arts and Crafts bungalow-style on the outside and had a modern space on the interior,” Arthur said.
Instead of having the typical interior layout of an Arts and Crafts home, marked by closed off, smaller rooms, the Rouses wanted less defined formal rooms and more open space, and they worked with an architect who helped the couple come up with designs, which included a first-floor master bedroom and a great room that held a living room, dining room and kitchen.
The Rouses enlisted the services of Greg Martelli with Fox Hill Company, who has over 20 years of experience custom building homes, as well as preservation, to construct their new home, which they recently moved into at the beginning of May.
Along with the energy-efficient features mentioned previously, the couple had the home constructed with the intention of installing solar panels at a later time. However, while the Rouses’ home was being constructed, an H-1 overlay was installed over the portion of Ashland Park neighborhood that included the couple’s property, making it the last new home that will be built in the neighborhood (outside of any extreme situations). An H-1 overlay is designed to preserve structures of historic, cultural and architectural importance in Lexington, and as part of the zoning designation, property owners must seek approval from the Board of Architectural Review before making many alterations to the exterior of their homes.
A few years ago, another portion of Ashland Park received the H-1 overlay, and when the old Foursquare home was torn down, the initiative to have the rest of the neighborhood identified as a historic district was re-ignited, and eventually achieved earlier this year.
“We didn’t make that happen, but we probably forced its closure,” Arthur said. “We wouldn’t have bought over here if it was an H-1 overlay. Not a chance.”
Incidentally, when Arthur wanted to proceed with the solar panel project, he had to apply with the review board, which approved the design, after making some recommendations. He wonders what will happen if, for example, he needs to replace one of his aluminum windows, which, technically, aren’t in keeping with the rest of the neighborhood.
“Is this a historic home or not?” he asked. “We should be exempt from any sort of historical questions because all of this stuff was built today. There aren’t any historical elements to anything here, as opposed to the guy across the street who has the same kind of house, but it was built in 1930. So it’s a fun question, one for the lawyers to take up whenever the time is right.”
Until then, the Rouses are looking forward to spending time on one of their two new porches – being social, meeting their new neighbors. Arthur says a strong relationship among neighbors will preserve a neighborhood’s character and integrity with greater effect than limiting a homeowner’s property rights.
“A neighborhood doesn’t sustain itself with regulations like that,” he said, “it sustains itself with neighbors.”