Victorian
The owners’ nostalgia for their turn-of-the-century Victorian house in Minnesota resulted in the design of their new home in the historically-themed town of Celebration, Florida. The homeowners are a professional couple who sought to recapture the Queen Anne style of their Minnesota home, which was built in 1902. The same theme follows through the interior detailing and furnishings, especially in the formal areas of their new home.
The new Victorian home is designed to fit on a one-third-acre irregular, five-sided lot. Since the lot is only forty feet wide where it fronts the street, the architect created a prominent curbside presence by drawing the traditionally narrow front facade into the narrow front yard, angling the house to match the angled lot. Turning a potential liability into an asset, the architect let the house wrap the lot’s unusual outline, thus keeping the home two rooms wide throughout and leaving a spacious side courtyard for the pool.
The house has four bedrooms, four baths, and two half-baths in 5,575 square feet of living space. Above the three-car garage is a guest apartment with a fifth bedroom, a bath, a kitchen, and dining and living areas. Other highlights are a study, a sewing alcove, a small upstairs sitting room overlooking the foyer below. In addition, there is a children’s playroom at second-floor level which features a soaring fifteen-foot ceiling and clerestory windows, located in an octagonal turret which is the tallest structure on the street.
The exterior siding is painted Wythe blue with white trim. A white scrollsaw gable detail, fashioned by a carpenter from the architect’s original hand-drawn, full-scale template, casts a lacy shadow in the Florida sunshine. Fretwork adorns the tops of the front porch posts, which were custom-turned according to the original, hand-drawn profile. This level of original detailing is unusual today, even in a period-themed community like Celebration.