Private Residence

When BPA began a program for this residence in downtown Huntsville, it was a two story, flat roofed apartment complex of eight units in the main house and one in a back wing, separate and behind the house. Research led us to learn that the main house had been built in the 1870s. The back wing was much older than the main house and had apparently been built as an outbuilding to a house that had been on the site and had been burned to the ground by federal troops in 1862. A photo of the new house, built in 1875, showed a three story French Second Empire home that had been turned into apartments in 1918, around the beginning of WWI. The house suffered another catastrophic fire in the 1950s that left the third floor completely ruined; it was never rebuilt.

Working with only one photo, we were able to identify only a few original doors and no trim original to the house. BPA gutted the apartment building, rebuilt the distinctive roof and third floor, and began designing according to what structural walls were still intact. The only two structural walls were those on either side of the central hall; the others had been moved around so much that they had no ties at all to structure. Two and a half years and quite a bit of rebuilding later, we returned the single family home to its grand, Second Empire style.