Cooper-Young home beloved by singer Amy LaVere opens up
John Baker Homes in February bought a dog-eared, Cooper-Young house. Its longtime tenant was a wellknown performer, and its rooms were of the late Victorian era.
Singer-musician Amy LaVere moved out of the house last year, and this spring the kitchen, walls and other things inside the house moved — thanks to John Baker.
“I love that little house,” LaVere said of the place she called home for nearly 10 years. The singer, songwriter and bass player moved after buying a house in Memphis.
“... I knew all the neighbors. I loved that neighborhood. I hated to leave it,” she said.
“... In all the years I ever lived there, I had somebody break into my car one time. Other than that I never had a
problem.”
Opening it up
But new owner Baker had a problem with the interior layout of the house built in 1900.
Walls divided the three-bedroom, one-bath home at 994 New York into boxes. Bedrooms didn’t necessarily have their own bathroom or closet. The kitchen was in back, living room in front, and dining room in the middle.
Some renovation firms would “just paint it and maybe put some nice lighting in and put it back on the market,” Baker said. And most renovations would never involve moving things like kitchens, tubs and toilets.
“Well, a lot of those (older houses) don’t function” to contemporary standards, Baker said. “You can’t live in that house. You can adjust your life to the house but who wants to do that? ... People want a bathroom attached to a bedroom now.”
So Baker, with his wife, Jane Pate, and son Evan Baker, moved the kitchen, tub and toilet as well as other things like walls, the front door and windows.
The home with historic charm, wellknown former tenant and now a modern interior hits the market Sunday with an open house from 2 to 4 p.m. The list price is $229,000.
‘Thoughtfully’ renovated
John Baker is a 62-year-old urban planner with experience in real estate and construction. He worked for 30 years for nonprofits like the old Free the Children and the Health, Educational and Housing Facility Board of Memphis before starting his own renovation firm about two years ago.
John Baker Homes’ tagline is: “Homes thoughtfully conserved and renovated.”
Baker was thoughtful enough to substantially change what the builders of 994 York created while expressing respect for their designs and craftsmanship.
“I think people devalue the Victorian people and say, ‘Oh, they were simpleminded. They were unsophisticated.’ No, they weren’t. Don’t undersell those people.”
3/1 or ‘killer’ 2/2?
One of the first decisions Baker and Pate faced was whether to keep it as a three-bedroom, one-bath house.
“We talk with different Realtors and appraisers about what we do before we do it,” said Pate, whose day job is managing the Memphis regional office of Entegrity. The company helps businesses make their buildings more energy efficient.
Baker and Pate’s big question to Realtors and appraisers: Should they renovate the home as a so-so three-bed, one-bath house or a “killer” two-bed, two-bathroom house?
The answer was clear. “So we made it a killer two-bed/two-bath,” Pate said.
By sacrificing a bedroom, they had room to create a master bedroom suite in front of the house with a walk-in closet and large bathroom.
The firm not only renovated the existing bathroom toward the back of the house, it moved the toilet so that it is no longer in direct line of sight when the bathroom door opens.
Moving the kitchen
The most noticeable change was moving the kitchen from the back to the front of the house and removing a wall so that the kitchen opens to the living room.
When a kitchen is walled away at the back of the house it’s not “part of the social context,” Baker said. “That’s different today. People want to be involved in cooking and talking and socializing and visiting, all at once. We tried to accommodate that.”
They also painted inside and out, rebuilt the driveway, enlarged the back deck, installed storm windows on the oversized original windows, installed LED lighting throughout the house, added attic installation, rewired the house after removing the old knob-andtube wiring, and installed a tankless water heater.
“I’m fortunate to have a wife with good design skills and a son who’s really coming on in craftsmanship,” Baker said.
Renovation as ‘art’
Evan Baker, 25, had just left what was for him an unsatisfactory job in collections for a bank when he started working for his dad.
“It’s incredibly fulfilling,” he said of the renovation work. “You get to take pictures of the before and after and look back and see how much progress you’ve made.
“With a visual sort of art — I think of it as art — you get to see where ... you have been and at the end of a couple of months you go to a brand-new one and start all over. I think it’s fantastic.”
The 994 New York house is the sixth home John Baker Homes has renovated.
“We need to find a house that’s been neglected,” John Baker said. “We’re not in the habit of breaking up good relationships between people and their houses. If there’s been a bad relationship, there may be room for us.”
Hot and getting hotter
The two blocks of New York that are north and south of Young is “red hot,” Baker said. “There are three houses going up, our rehab is wrapping up and there’s a big rehab about to kick off across the street from us.”
The southeast corner of CooperYoung had been relatively underappreciated, he believes.
“A few people know of the city and state’s plans to redevelop the fairgrounds,” he said of the public acreage two blocks to the east. “And I tell real estate friends this area may seem hot, (but) it’s about to get hotter.”
A place for songwriting
LaVere wrote a lot of her songs in the old house.
“I wrote my last three solo records, mostly with an acoustic guitar, in the kitchen,” she said by text message.
Among the the songs were “Cricket” on her album, “Hallelujah I’m a Dreamer.”