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Home tour celebrates the vintage and the elegant By Harold Bubil Real Estate Editor Published: Saturday, February 25, 2012 at 5:27 p.m.
It seems that for Sarasota's Bungalow Hill neighborhood, once you live there, your heart never leaves. Jen Graue and Susan Hritz Scholz bear witness to this. Graue grew up in a 1935 house on Citrus Avenue, left for college and moved to Atlanta
STAFF PHOTO / HAROLD BUBIL
after graduation. But she always told her
The Samuel T. Humber House, at 993 S.
mother, who still lived in the Citrus house, "If you ever sell, I would like the chance to buy it." In 1995, she got that chance, and took
Orange Ave., Sarasota, is among five houses in the Bungalow Hills section that will be featured on the 2012 Historic Homes Tour, presented March 4 by the Sarasota Alliance for
advantage of it.
Historic Preservation. The Dutch Colonial Revival landmark has an accentuated front
A block away, at 993 S. Orange Ave., interior
door with decorative pediment above; the style dominated residential design in the United
designer Susan Hritz owned a landmark Dutch Colonial, selling it only after she married architect Cliff Scholz. They lived for several years in a grand waterfront house of his design. But when the Orange Avenue house came back on the market, the seller contacted her, and
States during the first half of the 20th century. The house is owned by architect Cliff Scholz and his wife, interior designer Susan Hritz Scholz, who owned and sold it as a single woman and recently repurchased it with her husband. Photo taken 2-20-2012 by Harold Bubil.
soon the Scholzes were moving back "home." The quiet neighborhood, with its stately vintage houses, grid streets, magnificent tree canopy and convenience to downtown, Southside Village and Sarasota Memorial Hospital, has that kind of appeal. Both the Graue and Hritz-Scholz houses are among five that the Sarasota Alliance for Historic Preservation will feature on its annual Historic Homes Tour from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. March 4. Tickets are $20 at the tour houses; a trolley will shuttle tour-goers from Gateway Bank on U.S. 41 at Bahia Vista Street. Historian Lorrie Muldowney will narrate from aboard the trolley. "It is an historic neighborhood with nice, majestic homes," said tour chairman Jesse White. For tour purposes, the houses have names that commemorate the people who built or lived in them first. Jen and Dan Graue's house, for example, is known as the Edwards-Fritts Home, and it has quite a pedigree. It was designed by famed Sarasota architect Thomas Reed Martin, although it does not look like the typical TRM Mediterranean revival of the 1920s land boom. "It's a California mission-Mediterranean-Florida ... mess," said a smiling Jen Graue, using the word with the best of intentions. Its first owner was A.B. Edwards, an influential Sarasota mayor during the 1910s. Edwards owned the house until he sold it to Jen Graue's mother, Peg Fritts, in 1957.
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The Scholz house is known as the Samuel T. Humber House and dates to 1927; its architecture echoes a style that was prominent throughout the nation in the first part of the 20th century. To compensate her architect-husband for tolerating the traffic on busy Orange Avenue, Susan Scholz let him build a wall around the property, which is patrolled by her dog, a black Lab who is friendly once the barking stops. Other homes on the tour: nThe Lee Brewster and Lillian Hatch Home, 1657 Alta Vista St. Built around 1918, this was one of the first homes in Bungalow Hill, which once was its own incorporated town before giving in to the annexing advances of Sarasota to the north in the 1920s. The Hatch house is a pretty, light blue Craftsman-style residence with a large front dormer. The usable living space on the second floor makes it what was commonly called a "bungalow and a half." Since its purchase by the current owners in 2001, the house has been stabilized structurally and made more energy efficient. They have updated the kitchen and baths while retaining original moldings and trim. It will be hard for tour-goers to miss the enormous tree in the front yard, on the corner of Alta Vista and Citrus. nThe Hollins House, 1115 Citrus Ave. The late Herald-Tribune social columnist Helen Griffith once lived at this address, but her vintage house was torn down years ago to make way for this "re-interpreted Mediterranean Revival style" home in 1991. The new owners, contractor Ken Sears and his wife, Gwendolyn, were "mindful of being in an historic neighborhood and having the scale of the other homes," said White, owner of Sarasota Architectural Salvage. "We thought that was a creative type of infill that should be featured, because when it comes to historic neighborhoods and homes, there is a lot of development pressure, and sometimes the neighborhood character can change by building houses that are off the scale of the rest of the neighborhood." The current owner, Ann Hollins, worked with T.H. Davis, a landscape architect from St. Petersburg, to redesign the landscape and enclose the property with walls. nThe Floyd Washington and Alice Van Gilder Home, 1115 S. Orange Ave. This house is notable, says White, because it illustrates how a large addition can be made while preserving the original intent of a historic home. The current owners bought it as a teardown. But they changed their minds and enlarged it — the addition is set back from the original house, maintaining the scale — after falling in love with the house. We have heard that story before. Copyright © 2014 HeraldTribune.com — All rights reserved. Restricted use only.
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