URBAN REVIVAL
Preservation efforts give historic neighborhood new life
In the 110 years of its life, the story of the Oscar C. Jersig House in Woodland Heights has, finally, come full circle.
Built in 1908 by William A. Wilson Realty, it was a model home used to promote what was then a new neighborhood for the city’s rising middle class. Situated between the city’s near northside and Houston’s Heights, the home was an example of a classic, two-story American Foursquare home.
Its current owners, Dominic Yap and Pei-Lin Chong, were already old hands at historic preservation — they own FW Heritage, which saves old homes in First Ward and builds historically sensitive new homes — when a friend, Laura Michaelides, alerted them to the Jersig site.
It was a mess. Numerous owners through the years had built walls, added doorways and porches, removed stairs and eventually turned it into a multiplex structure. Even the garage in back had been converted into three apartments, and there were always eight or nine cars
parked on the street for it.
“She said either you have to save it or someone’s going to buy it for lot value, tear it down and put up townhomes,” Yap said of the warning from Michaelides, principal designer at Four Square Design Studio.
Yap and Chong’s home will be one of eight featured on the biannual Woodland Heights Home tour this weekend. Their home earned a Good Brick Award from Preservation Houston in 2017 and also has protected landmark status from the city of Houston.
Platted in 1907, Woodland Heights is one of the city’s oldest and most historic neighborhoods. One of the tour’s homes, a 6,363-squarefoot prairie-style home restored to showplace status, was once owned by William A. Wilson.
Three of the tour homes are dubbed “Teardown Turnarounds” — the home of Chong and Yap is one of them — meant to show people what can be done to save a home that others might see as a pile of rubble.
“If you would see before and after pictures, you would be aghast at how it looked,” Yap said of his home’s state when he and Chong first visited it. “I’m looking at trim and floors and doors, and she fell in love with the fireplace. That’s what sealed the deal.”
While renovations were under way, the couple lived in one of three garage apartments — it was just 350 square feet — and couldn’t wait for the work to finish. They bought the home in 2014 and moved into the finished, 2,400-square-foot main home in April 2015. That old garage was demolished to make room for a big carport with a large shed in the back.
And, yes, they can laugh about it now: “I believe our life span was shortened by a year or so living in that house,” Yap said.
“Our bookkeeper was like, ‘Really? I have to come to work here?’ ” Chong added, noting that another tiny apartment served as their office.
The main house had been turned into three apartments, one took up the whole main floor and two split the upstairs.
At some point, an owner removed the staircase from the first floor to a midfloor landing. An outside staircase led to a door and that landing so that upstairs tenants could get to their apartments.
It proved lucky for Yap and Chong that the home was an early model home for the neighborhood because it was featured in a brochure that someone kept, so they knew exactly what it should look like to get it back to its original state.
Another home in the neighborhood had a similar floor plan — they both mimicked the Sears’ catalog “Chelsea” kit home — and that owner was kind enough to let Yap and Chong tour their home to see first-hand what they needed to do.
In its original plans, the Jersig home had a parlor, living room, dining room and kitchen downstairs with three bedrooms and a single bathroom upstairs. Its bragging points were electricity and indoor plumbing, both still fairly new in homes then.
Layers of changes through the years included enclosing the front porch to make the lower apartment larger and adding a sleeping porch to the second floor, then later converting that space to be part of an upstairs kitchen.
Both of those things came off to re-create the spacious porch and to restore the original look of the home’s upstairs facade. Not only was that extra upstairs space unsightly, but it was likely unsafe since what was a porch ceiling was never meant to hold a kitchen above it.
Another porch had been added to the back of the home, but it wasn’t safe either — Yap called it a “leanto” — so the couple removed it and, instead, expanded the back of the home to have a larger kitchen, mud room and office.
Yap, who is Malaysian, spent his career working as a geologist for Occidental Petroleum all over the world, and retired in his 50s to buy, restore and sell older homes. In the past several years, the couple has finished 14 homes, including their own, and have two more underway now.
It’s not just older homes that they love.
Yap has a penchant for functional things that still work, like his music collection, which ranges from an old Victrola that plays one song to a 1950s-era jukebox that sits in a corner of the dining room.
An old bar cart of vintage kitchen gadgets represents some of Chong’s interests, as does a wall of iron trivets and a row of hand-crank coffee grinders on top of kitchen cabinets.
An upstairs bedroom with oil amps and colorful bottles prompts Yap to acknowledge their collecting hobby.
“Lin calls this our ‘need to downsize’ room,” Yap said. “She talks about all of my collections and is very quiet about this, but all of those oil lamps are hers. And those colorful bottles are hers.”
“We’re really just tidy hoarders,” she replied with a mischievous grin.