‘A labor of love’
Working from home has a new meaning for this vintage park house caretaker and restorer
Sean O’Donnell remembers walking by the Victorian-era Knight Park House, every day on his way to Collingswood High School.
But he’d never set foot in the place — let alone imagined he would one day live and work there — until a decade later, when he became the local landmark’s resident caretaker in 2020.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I couldn’t say no to it,” said O’Donnell, who’s also restoring the house on behalf of the nonprofit Knight Park Board of Trustees, which owns the 60-acre park in Collingswoord, New Jersey.
“I do all the work myself, by hand and on ladders,” he said. “I just love to get my hands dirty.”
A 2014 graduate of Williamson College of the Trades in Media, Pennsylvania, where he majored in horticulture, O’Donnell is the third resident caretaker and restorer of the park house since 2010, when the Proud Neighbors of Collingswood organization began funding restoration. The park itself was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.
“Proud Neighbors has always been about historic preservation, and the Knight Park House was not in the best of shape,” said founding member Frank Vita.
Proud Neighbors has donated more than $30,000 to the restoration so far because “we want to work with the trustees to restore the house to what it was when Mr. Knight donated it to the community,” Vita said.
The Knight Park Board of Trustees estimates that contracting out the restoration could have cost as much as $250,000 and that the live-in caretaker-restorer approach could end up costing as little as the $30,000, all of it provided through donations and fundraising.
Offering landscaped open space in Collingswood’s densely developed core, Knight Park is an easy walk from many neighborhoods in the 1.9-square-mile borough, which has a population of about 14,000.
The busy stretch of restaurants and shops along Haddon Avenue two blocks from the park attests to Collingswood’s ongoing evolution from just another suburb to a destination.
“Knight Park is Collingswood’s biggest and best asset — a stabilizing asset,” said park trustee Michael Brennan. “So we had to preserve the house.”
Brennan credits former commissioner and business owner Joan Leonard with originating the resident caretaker-restorer approach in 2010.
After the longtime resident caretaker and his family moved out, “we had an opportunity to really start looking at the bones of the house and see what was in need of restoration,” she said.
“Each (caretaker-restorer) has done what they can, bit by bit, removing carpeting, removing coats of paint and bringing the house back to the original wood. It’s exhausting work,” said Leonard.
“As much as it’s a beautiful house and you’re living in the middle of a park, it’s a labor of love. You have to really love that house.”
Like his predecessors, O’Donnell donates his labor in exchange for living in the house rent-free. An initial two-year agreement likely will be extended for as long as progress is being made, and both parties want to continue it, said Brennan.
“We had a committee of volunteer architects and experts look over the house and give us some preliminary advice and spoke to carpenters and contractors as well,” Leonard said. “We chose what (projects) could be done within the expertise of a caretaker, and Proud Neighbors donated the seed money.”
The six-room house was built as a gathering place for the public, with a wraparound porch and a decorative rooftop viewing platform called a belvedere.
Unlike the interior of the house, where original woodwork, windows, doors and plaster remain (some of it under multiple layers of paint and varnish), the porch and belvedere have been substantially altered, O’Donnell said.
The house still has the original cedar clapboarding that was covered by siding for decades, said
O’Donnell. “Holes had been drilled in (some of the clapboards) when insulation was installed, and I had to fill them all in.
“Right now I’m putting the final coat on the trim. It’s a lot of work. Hours and hours of stripping, scraping, priming, but I wanted to get this stuff done before the winter starts. I’ll do the (south) side of the house in the spring.”
Residing in the park “is amazing,” he said. “It’s quite a place to wake up in and look out the window at the trees. And it’s quiet.”
O’Donnell lived in the house by himself for nearly two years until he married Eileen O’Mara on Oct. 6. They were wed under an arbor of red cedar they built together from lumber salvaged from a Knight Park tree, with one of the native plant gardens he has cultivated as a backdrop for the ceremony.
“I have had the privilege of watching Sean work passionately to bring life back to this historic home for nearly two years,” Eileen, a special-education teacher in Haddon Township, said in an email. “It amazes and inspires me to see the dedication he has to his work restoring and preserving the character of this home.”
Her husband said peeling away the layers, disassembling and reassembling fixtures, and getting to know the bones of the house has helped sharpen his carpentry skills and taught him the value of patience, he said.
“I have made sure to be patient and to not rush through any of my preservation projects,” O’Donnell said.
He also has learned “to appreciate the craftsmanship and great patience it took the men and women who built this home and the stewards who cared for it in the decades before me,” he said.
Sitting on top of the roof, where the belvedere once stood, O’Donnell said: “It’s been missing for years. I’ve been researching myself what it would take to build something like that.
“I’d love to be the one to build it and put it back on the house. It’ll be like the cherry on top.”