It was an aging rancher that had been on the market for two years. It was on 1 1/4 acres in a prime Arlington neighborhood, but the yard was overgrown and the house was a mess: The interiors had a musty smell from being empty for so long, and a rickety pool enclosure seemed about to fall down.
“It was being promoted as a tear-down,” said Maggie Grant, the current owner. There were no pictures of the house in the sales materials — only the land plat.
Arlington’s proximity to the city makes its smaller, older houses excellent candidates for new owners and developers to tear down and start over with new construction. But Max and Maggie Grant saw potential in this house, which was solidly built and had much more space than met the eye from the curb.
“The bones were here. The structure was here — we just had to bring it back to life,” Maggie Grant said.
Aside from closing off one doorway into the foyer, they made no structural changes, designer Dana Tydings said. “Everything else was lift and tuck.”
First on the list was the silver hand-painted Gracie wallpaper in the living room. “Everyone said, ‘Aren’t you going to tear it down?’ ”
Grant said. But she recognized the workmanship of the venerable, century-old company and decided to restore it, washing off decades of built-up film from cigarette smoke.
Decorating the house, Tydings said, was a matter of preserving the good and improving the bad.
In the foyer, for example, she replaced old wrought-iron stair railings with sleek glass panels. And for a big first impression, she added oversized paisley-pattern wallpaper down the main wall, plus an extravagant vintage ’40s light fixture.
Tydings then complemented the living room wallpaper with neutral furnishings and window treatments that wouldn’t steal the show.
The family room design also followed from an original element: the decorative built-in shelves and cabinetry. Tydings and Grant freshened the paint, polished the hardware and even preserved the marbled black laminate counter surface.
Grant’s favorite room, however, is “Mother’s Bath.” It was thus called by the previous owner, the matriarch of a large Arlington family. Tydings and Grant brought back all its fancy, girlish qualities — and then some.
After cleaning the dirty bath and faucet fixtures, they discovered the solid-gold work of Sherle Wagner underneath. “When you get a client who can afford it, you use it sparingly,” Tydings said, noting that she was surprised nobody stole the fixtures while the house was empty for so long.
The Grants do plan to add on to the house in the next year or two — and restore the pool and its retractable-roof enclosure — but they are pleased to have found a house that fit them and their two children comfortably and that required only cosmetic improvements to move in.
It will be, in Grant’s words, their “forever house.” “We always say, ‘You’re taking us out feet first.’ ”
