Putting the oomph in Opa’s house
In renovated ranch house, history lives in 21st-century comfort
For Joy and Ben Culpepper, restoring the 1882 Fredericksburg ranch house that had been in Joy’s family for generations was at once an act of love and one of commerce — with a few surprises to boot.
During the yearlong, top-tobottom renovation, hardly a surface was left untouched, inside and out. They divided one large bedroom into two, added two new bathrooms, gutted the kitchen, replaced the roof, rewired and removed the plaster covering the interior limestone walls.
The newly renovated shortterm rental was dubbed Opa O’s Gast Haus, named for Joy’s greatgreat-grandfather Johann Oehler, who emigrated from Germany in 1854. It features an intriguing mix of old and new, from the modern travertine tiles next to 150-yearold limestone walls, to the battered barn door covering a newly discovered window opening, to the many Old World details that would be nearly impossible to replicate today.
When the couple, who split their time between San Antonio and Fredericksburg, bought the house in 2019 from distant relatives of Joy, it had been unoccupied for nearly 30 years. Unoccupied by people, that is. A family of raccoons had taken up residence, and there was a hole in the roof — blasted open by a lightning strike — not far from where a cactus had taken root.
In other words, the place was a mess.
Still, the bones were good, with sturdy, 2-foot-thick limestone walls and gorgeous longleaf pine flooring, a credit to Joy’s relatives, Paul and Karolina Oehler, who built the original structure. Sometime in the 1920s, someone built a Craftsman-style addition to the home, although no one remembers who did it or when.
Originally a three-bedroom, 1 ½-bathroom home, it now has four bedrooms and 3 ½ bathrooms. Listed on Airbnb since November, the 3,000-square-foot house sleeps up to 12 with pernight rates of $500 on weeknights and $800 on weekends.
From the outside, it’s nearly impossible to tell which part of the ranch house-style structure is the original and which is the 1920s addition as the exterior walls are all covered in painted plaster. The only obvious design element are the tapered columns, common to Craftsman-style homes, that support the outside porch roof.
“I was tempted to remove the plaster stucco from the walls to expose the limestone, but I was told that the plaster is harder on the outside of the house than it is on the interior,” said Ben, 67, a retired lawyer who invests in commercial real estate. “They said if you start chiseling it off, sometimes the rock part will come off, too.”
Once work started on the interior, they had no idea what they’d find beneath the plaster, according to Joy, 65, the retired director of guidance services for North East ISD, and there were surprises.
In the dining room, for example, they discovered a window opening in what was once an exterior wall that had been hidden since the Craftsman addition was built. Rather than fill in the space, they covered it with an old wood door taken from a nearby barn they tore down. The door now floats several feet off the floor in the middle of the wall.
The couple long had their eye on the house and considered buying it when it came up for sale in 1991. But the $400,000 asking price was too much for them at the time.
“It would have been a great deal,” Ben said, “but we had two little kids and we didn’t have that kind of money just sitting in a cookie jar.”
In 2019, when they were finally in a financial position to buy, the house was valued at only $26,000 on the tax rolls, a reflection of its dilapidated condition. But the couple ended up spending about $400,000 anyway to renovate it and make improvements to the property.
The couple tried to keep as much of the home’s history in place while making it as comfortable as possible for 21st-century renters. Antique finds placed throughout include a wall-mounted pepper mill in the kitchen and a seed planter they repurposed as flower planter in the front yard.
Perhaps the most striking example of how the house allows a coexistence between the old and the new is in the master bathroom shower, where the travertine wall abuts a portion of the original limestone wall.
“The only thing we had to do was coat the limestone with a water sealer so it doesn’t absorb the moisture,” he said.
They also salvaged as many of the original fixtures as they could, including the doors. They repainted several, while others they only sanded, leaving multiple coats of different-colored paint visible for a shabby chic effect.
Most of the ground floor was covered with linoleum that, when removed, revealed beautifully preserved longleaf pine flooring. “All we needed to do was polish it up and it looked great,” he said. “That rich orange isn’t stain; it’s the natural color.”
Modernity came by way of adding heating, air conditioning and an on-demand water heater, and removing most of the wall that separated the kitchen from the dining room to open up the ground floor.
But even the completely modern kitchen calls back to the home’s history. Beyond the pepper mill, the center island and counter are topped with a natural stone quartzite that has a handsome greenish veining that complements the greenish-gray cabinets.
“If you look at photos of old country kitchens, a lot of them have green in them,” Ben added.
The green quartzite also appears on several end tables created by their cabinet maker, who crafted them from leftover wood.
Most of the ceilings in the house are pine tongue-andgroove beadboard, which was popular for walls and ceilings in these older homes, according to Ben. “We didn’t want to spend the money to put it on all the walls, so we just did the ceilings and the wainscoting in the bathrooms,” he said.
Ben said they found so many artifacts (i.e., pieces of junk) strewn throughout the property, it took three flatbed trailers to haul it all away. But he did save some to repurpose in the renovation.
The chandelier in the dining room, for example, is made of three glass milk bottles cut in half hanging from a large hunk of wood. That’s suspended from the ceiling on a thick iron chain Ben dug up in the backyard. One of the milk bottles has what appears to be a BB hole in it — apparently it was used for target practice.
Pieces of weathered wood were made into the fireplace mantel, as well as the newel and handrail on the stairway to the second floor. Combining the rustic with the modern was deliberate.
“It kind of honors my relatives who built this house and before,” Joy said. “We found things on the ranch that they once owned in the 1850s, so we wanted that look.”
There were limits to how original they wanted to keep it, however. Although they wanted to keep the original windows, they were too delicate (while using his leaf blower one day, Ben broke a couple, just from the force of the air). So against the architect’s advice they installed all new ones.
The upstairs floor has three bedrooms and 1 ½ bathrooms, all surrounding a central game room equipped with a large TV and foosball table. Two of the bedrooms were originally one large room, but a wall was built between them, and four single beds were added to one and a large king-size bed to the other. The third bedroom also has a king bed.
“We thought people would prefer kings, plus it’s easier to track sheets and bedcovers when they’re all the same,” Ben said, explaining why they went with bigger beds. “There’s no need for dressers and cabinets in a shortterm rental, either, so the kings fit in the smaller rooms.”
Finally, they transformed what had been a second-floor sunroom into a large, full bathroom that looks straight out of the 1920s or ’30s, with black-and-white hexagonal tile on the floor and in the shower.
Out with the old, in with the new — that looks old.