House Proud: The 6-Month Makeover, 36 Years Later
December 4, 2003
By CHARLES LOCKWOOD
WHEN Clem and Claire Labine bought an 1883 brownstone on
Berkeley Place in Park Slope in 1967, they had no idea that
the renovation would create a new career for Mr. Labine
(who founded Old House Journal), nor that they would carry
out one of the longest-running brownstone restorations in
Brooklyn.
The showiest rooms in their four-story Neo-Grec-style
residence, like those in most brownstones, are found on the
first floor off the main entrance at the top of the stoop.
The 28-by-14-foot front parlor has walls glazed in Pompeian
red, an 1840's late-Empire sofa, late-19th-century chairs,
and occasional tables in the styles of the Aesthetic
Movement and the Moorish Revival. Two white marble statues
and several busts provide just a touch of Victorian
clutter.
But what catches the eye are friezes just below the gilt
ceiling cornices. In the dining room, the frieze is
sunflowers, a favorite emblem of the 1880's Aesthetic
Movement. The parlor frieze, based on an Art Nouveau
wallpaper pattern, shows strutting peacocks against a
backdrop of reddish orange poppies.
And all it took was a few decades. "By the mid-1960's, we
had three children - Matthew, Eleanor and John - and we had
outgrown our apartment in Queens," said Claire Labine, a
writer of television daytime soap operas including "Ryan's
Hope." "We were contemplating a move to the suburbs."
But at a New Year's Eve party in 1966 the Labines learned
about Park Slope, a frontier for adventuresome renovators.
They toured the neighborhood, and, Mrs. Labine said, "I
fell in love with the brownstone renovation idea - but it
took a while to get Clem on board." More than a while: a
year and a half. "I was dubious about the future of Park
Slope and New York City itself," he said. "But I saw
practical advantages, like a quicker and cheaper commute to
Midtown Manhattan than from the suburbs.
"I also convinced myself," he said, "that owning a
brownstone meant less upkeep, like no grass to mow, for
example."
In the spring of 1967, the Labines saw a four-story rooming
house on Berkeley Place between Seventh and Eighth Avenues
that spoke to them. There were Minton tiles showing
Tennyson's "Idylls of the King" on a fireplace surround in
the dining room, and Mrs. Labine's mother had once read
Tennyson to her. "I had to have those tiles, which meant we
had to buy the house," she said.
In their enthusiasm and naïveté, the Labines thought that
renovation would take six months. What they didn't know was
that old brownstones with chunks of woodwork missing and
calcimine-treated walls, and with antiquated wiring and
plumbing, would resist topnotch restoration.
They paid $25,100 for the four-story brownstone. "Shortly
after we bought the house, one new neighbor condescendingly
told me, `You paid too much - nobody pays more than $25,000
for a brownstone in Park Slope,' " Mr. Labine recalled. (A
similar house coming on the market today - unrenovated -
would sell for $800,000 to $900,000; renovated it would be
as much as $2.5 million. )
The family, including Mrs. Labine's mother, moved into the
brownstone over Labor Day weekend in 1967. "A few days
after we moved in, I painted the interiors of a dozen
closets," Mrs. Labine said. "By evening, the new paint was
falling off the walls in strips. That's how we learned that
you have to wash down the old calcimine-painted surfaces
before you apply new paint." (Calcimine, consisting of
clear glue, Paris white or zinc white pigment and water, is
used to wash plastered surfaces.)
Although the Labines made mistakes in the early years, they
had a master plan. "Our first priority was the children's
rooms upstairs, so they wouldn't run away," Mrs. Labine
said. Then her mother's room. Then the kitchen, followed by
a new study and library in the basement.
"We saved the front and back parlor for last, because we
knew that they were the most important rooms," Mr. Labine
said. "We wanted to make sure that we had perfected our
skills and knowledge before we tackled them." They never
took out a construction loan but adopted a pay-as-you-go
budget. "Whenever Claire got a chunk of money from a
writing job, then we'd do a project," Mr. Labine said. They
did most of the work themselves.
Fittingly, Mr. Labine, who was editing Chemical
Engineering, a trade publication, turned out to be a
perfectionist. Where original woodwork was missing or badly
damaged in the upstairs bedrooms, he cut replacement pieces
with a handsaw. And the Labines discovered, as does anyone
undertaking a major renovation, that embarking on one
project revealed a dozen other problems. Mr. Labine, for
instance, could not complete a new kitchen in the original
rear extension off the dining room until he had shored up
the extension's foundation.
But the slow renovation schedule proved a blessing in
disguise. Mr. Labine feels it helped him to resist the
impulse to modernize. "When we moved into the house, I was
under the sway of the shelter magazines of the period,
which insisted that old houses had to be remodeled," he
said, "that a gloomy Victorian house was merely the
framework that you transform into a cheerful contemporary
dwelling."
The deeper they got in their renovation, the more they
became interested in Victorian homes and in duplicating the
original handiwork in the house. In 1973, Mr. Labine quit
his job at Chemical Engineering to create Old House Journal
in the windowed basement floor of the house. He and his
first associate editor, Carolyn Flaherty, worked in the
back room while Mrs. Labine worked on "Ryan's Hope" with
her writing partner in the front room. Fourteen years
later, Mr. Labine sold Old House Journal to a partner and
founded Traditional Building, a magazine that is a
where-to-find-it source for products and services for
commercial and civic buildings. He also founded Period
Homes, a quarterly that serves the same function for
residential structures. Both magazines were started in the
basement.
By the time the Labines tackled the front and back parlors,
they could afford to hire the finest decorative painters.
Mr. Labine created the peacock stencils from designs he
found in a book of Art Nouveau decoration, and then the
decorative painters Helmut Bucherl and Howard Zucker worked
for three weeks on the front parlor ceiling and the peacock
frieze. He told the Labines not to look until their work
was done.
"I literally cried when I first saw the frieze," Mrs.
Labine said. "Even years later, in the evening when the
children had gone to bed, I'd sometimes go to the parlor,
lie on the floor and look up at the ceiling."
After living in the Park Slope house for more than 30
years, the Labines, like any homeowners, have had to
repaint rooms or refinish floors. "We are literally
conserving and preserving some of the best of our earlier
work," he said. "And in other areas, we are correcting
errors made in ignorance in the 1970's and 1980's." A water
leak last year led to even more repair work.
Mrs. Labine said the house would always be a work in
progress. "Clem is devoted to the renovation process," she
said. "He likes to try out ideas on the house." An
architectural historian or brownstone purist might ask,
"Has the house been overrestored?"
After all, when it was built, their brownstone looked
nothing like their restoration. "We've analyzed the layers,
and what it was originally was fairly dull, and standard
1880's touches," Mr. Labine said. "But that doesn't mean
that it couldn't have looked like this. We've done things
that could have happened in the 1880's."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/04/garden/04PROU.html?ex=1071582790&ei=1&en=97f92339da553dfd
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