Come on in!
The good ol’ days are here to stay in this guesthouse
Melanie Patterson’s grandparents bought this house on Broad Avenue in Belle Vernon in 1949, flush with $36,000 they’d received for the Fayette City farm they sold to make way for I-70. Her grandmother decorated it when they moved in, and much of that decor stayed until 2006, when the last of their 12 children stopped living there.
“Back in the old days, you didn’t just redecorate,” said Ms. Patterson. “If it wasn’t broke, you didn’t fix it.”
When none of the other family members wanted the house, Ms. Patterson bought it in 2006 intending to fix it up and rent it out as a guest house. But the contractors she brought in couldn’t stop reminiscing over the perfectly preserved mint green tiles in the kitchen or the mustard yellow paint in the living room.
It occurred to Ms. Patterson that she could keep and even market the old decor. And so, the Good Ol’ Days House -jammed with carefully accumulated Western Pennsylvania memorabilia -was born.
“Many people equate this to the Heinz Museum,” said the former kindergarten teacher. “I’m trying to reflect the culture of middle class, American, steelworking people.”
She rents the Good Ol’ Days House by the day, week or for months at a time. Rates are currently $280 per night for a minimum of two nights, but vary by season and length of stay.
While North Belle Vernon may not seem like a tourist destination, Ms. Patterson receives plenty of guests visiting Pittsburgh, nearby Fallingwater, or going on hunting trips. Her meticulously kept guestbook also has entries from people returning to the area for a family funeral, looking for a place friendlier than a hotel room.
Against the advice of an interior decorator, who thought she should stick to one theme, each room reflects a different decade. With its vinyl chairs and polka dot curtains, the kitchen is a nod to the 1950s. The harvest yellow curtains and avocado green and burnt orange armchairs in the living room scream 1970s. Bathrooms are stocked with period bottles of Agree and Protein 21 shampoos, not to mention a “Go Steelers” toilet seat.
Notes in the bedrooms share family history, such as the room used at one time by five of her adult uncles. “They were working in the mills and had different shifts,” she said. “For some guys who fought in World War II, sleeping in a bed was a luxury.”
The basement is the ultimate Pittsburgh rec room, complete with a seat from Three Rivers Stadium signed by Bill Mazeroski, a working pinball machine and an old refrigerator stacked with board games. She is sometimes asked if she worries about anything in the house being stolen, especially the sports memorabilia.
“If you’ll notice,” she said, “there’s a picture of Jesus in every room. That’s our security guard.”
Ms. Patterson used a lot of the actual furnishings and knick-knacks from the home to furnish it, and collected more from other houses in the area. At this point, people routinely drop things off with her when they clean out an elderly relative’s home — pillowcases, pots, a 1960s ashtray. For her, authenticity is
important.
“I don’t want a reproduction,” she said. “You can go to Disneyland for that.”
Doris and Neil Apoldite of Langhorne, Pa., and four of their friends rented the house for a week in December, after Ms. Apoldite was looking for a vacation destination to surprise the rest of the group and happened upon the guesthouse’s website, www. nostalgicguesthouse.com.
“From the beginning to end, it was tremendous,” said Ms. Apoldite. “Not just the nostalgia of the house, but the love you felt from the second you entered the house. It just gives you such warm memories.”
At night, after making coffee on the percolator in the kitchen, ringing the doorbell that played the theme from “All in the Family” and playing Ms. PacMan on a tabletop console in the basement, Ms. Apoldite wandered the rooms of the house, finding treasures in every corner.
“I was born in 1953 and a lot of the decorations reminded me of my childhood,” she said. “The way the house was set up, it was almost like going back in time.”
The house will be open to the public Sunday for a “Valentines for Vets” event from 1-4 p.m. Refreshments will be provided as well as materials to create unique Valentines for Veterans to be distributed to local hospitals, nursing homes and The Veteran’s Place of Washington Boulevard in Larimer.