Time Capsule
Brian Steere knew the 1970s Merriman Valley split-level he purchased in 2013 was unusual, if not downright unique. When he was ready to remodel the 4,000-square-foot home’s gold-painted family room three years later, he received various pitches to bring the space into the 21st century by removing the distinctive stacked-sandstone wall behind the bar and the stacked-sandstone fireplace, and filling in the surrounding conversation pit. He loved that stacked sandstone was a signature feature that connected almost every house in the neighborhood, so he searched for remodelers who wanted to preserve the home’s architectural integrity.
“[The] goal was to make some nice modern updates but not lose the charm of the house,” says the co-president of Tallmadge-based engineering-and-manufacturing firm Steere Enterprises and co-owner of Springside Athletic Club in Montrose.
Steere choose Adam Kilgore, an independent remodeling contractor who now owns Cuyahoga Falls-based Alair Homes, to marry the old and new, the rustic and sleekly contemporary. He initially was hired to replace the foyer and family room carpeting with engineered hardwood and swap out a family room post with a more unobtrusive support beam, but his design suggestions were impressive, so he took over as interior designer too. Kilgore added a gated screen and rough-hewn cherry mantle to the fireplace, replaced the flammable conversation-pit carpeting with travertine tile and covered the pit’s built-in bench in a Berber weave. More importantly, he recommended swapping the nondescript paneled bar with a curving counterpart made of sandstone sourced from Ohio Beauty Cut Stone in Akron, stacked to match the wall behind it and topped with cherry, hickory and ash slabs.
“Somebody put a lot of effort into that stone back in the ’70s,” Kilgore says. “It might not look like something somebody would do exactly today. But we also [wanted] to honor the style of the original house.”
Three years later, Steere called Kilgore back to renovate the kitchen, dining room and living room, next to the step-down family room. The light-pink kitchen, poorly lit by a single window and sliding doors to a deck, was walled off from the dining and living rooms. The dining room was too small for Steere to extend the antique wooden dining table inherited from his great-grandmother to its full 12 feet, a length perfect for buffets and big sit-down dinners. And the neighboring living room was nothing more than a “dead space” where his three dogs slept.
“Those three separate spaces … were all too small for that size and that scale of a house, especially for the type of entertaining that he liked to do,” Kilgore says.
He combined the three rooms into one by replacing the load-bearing walls between them with a rustic cherry post and hand-hewn beams similar to the fireplace mantle and flooded the space with light by adding white-vinyl casement windows where overhead kitchen cabinetry once hung. The lost storage was gained in the island and walk-in butler’s pantry. The latter was created by enclosing the eat-in area at one end of the kitchen. “It gave [me] the opportunity to have a second sink and dishwasher for overflow,” Steere says. It also gave his wine refrigerator, long banished to the basement, a proper home. Kilgore replaced the sliding doors to the deck with a single door and extended under-counter cabinetry along a wall in the main kitchen.
“[Brian] liked to have this long stretch of uninterrupted countertop to lay out food and catering dishes,” Kilgore explains.
An Alair employee turned an outer wall of the butler’s pantry into a kitchen focal point by using a heavily veined marble tile to lay a herringbone-patterned counter-to-ceiling backsplash. The kitchen and dining room were painted white and finished to complement the contemporary family room decor. Old kitchen tile and honey-toned dining and living room hardwoods were replaced with the same engineered flooring in the family room and foyer. And kitchen cabinetry was ordered in a gray paint several shades darker than the family room walls and topped with light-gray-veined white quartz.
The clean lines of the white faux-leather kitchen island barstools and drum-style dining-room lighting fixture Steere selected are similar to those of the turquoise microfiber dining chairs he already had, now arranged around a fully extended dining table, as well as the gray-and-white family room furnishings.
“It was a more modern color [scheme] that fit the home,” Steere says.
The renovations have turned Steere’s house into a venue for entertaining over the last few years. Steere used the family room to host the Coleman Professional Services’ Right at Home benefit, which drew an estimated 100-plus people, and the kitchen and dining room to host Akron Children’s Museum’s capital campaign kickoff and a private dinner for 12 he bought from a Conservancy for Cuyahoga Valley National Park clambake, along with family holiday meals. He enjoys the trouble visitors have in differentiating old from new.
“That shows you what a great job [Kilgore did], the fact that you can’t even picture what it was before,” Steere marvels. “It’s got that wow factor. … It’s the kind of house [where] you want to tour the whole thing because of its uniqueness.”