By Jess Clarke / Photos By Tim Burleson
There’s a certain poignant quality to a former stunner whose looks have faded. That’s what Stewart Coleman of S.B. Coleman Construction Co. in Asheville encountered at a home in Biltmore Forest before he renovated the structure.
The house, built in 1922 for Judge Junius Adams, was the first occupied home in Biltmore Forest and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Before renovations, the dining room proved that the house had not been refurbished since its construction, Coleman says. Plaster moldings were crumbling, the floor was in disrepair, the wood mantel was cracked. The goal was to bring the room “back up to the fiber of a 1920s house using newer materials,” he explains. Workers replaced the fire-damaged mantel with a limestone mantel similar to others in the house.
Throughout the home, crews replaced moldings and re-plastered cracked walls. Sections of the floor, also damaged by fire, were replaced with oak flooring from closets in the house.
The renovation required heavy lifting, too, because of structural issues. The second floor had to be hoisted from the first floor’s structural walls, and a beam was installed from the front of the house to the rear to support the structural components of the floor above the dining room. A dining room wall was reconstructed and became the separation between that room and a newly built morning room.
Susan Nilsson, ASID of Susan Nilsson Interior Design in Asheville coordinated the home’s details: drapes, wood finishes and other aspects. In the dining area, the walls were painted to match the limestone fireplace, creating a refined backdrop for the homeowner’s custom-made round mahogany dining table and silverware. The aim was to “keep the house casual but have beautiful things,” Nilsson says.
One of the room’s centerpieces is a candelabrum chandelier of shimmering Waterford crystal. The homeowner found the 19th-century piece—rewired to work electrically—in Savannah, Georgia. Blending the formality of the chandelier with the relative informality of the house was a masterstroke, melding the old and the new. The end result has an ageless elegance.
