Broadview is not the oldest home in Arlington, but it is a prominent landmark. The house is one of the county’s best remaining examples of Queen Anne-style architecture from the late-19th century, according to the Arlington Historical Affairs and Landmark Review Board (HALRB), and is one of only four such homes to have a tower. What’s more, the entire house is its own local historic district.It’s an impressive residence, but it was far from perfect when Ginger Brown and her husband, Ken, bought the property in 2016.
Built in 1881 by Robert Stinson Lacey, a decorated Union captain during the Civil War, Broadview began as a modest house sited on 200 acres (today it occupies a third of an acre). Upon Lacey’s death, his daughter converted it into a boardinghouse.
A subsequent series of alterations over time left it with awkward spaces and historically inappropriate details, including a second tower that did not fit the original architectural style.
“It has an interesting history in that it has been added on to over time,” says Brown, executive director of the nonprofit Langston Boulevard Alliance, a local citizens’ initiative. Not all of those evolutions were good. “There were crappy additions added onto it in the 1920s and ’30s,” she says.
By the 1970s, the structure was pretty dilapidated. A new owner made repairs and even more modifications that kept it standing, but rendered the architecture yet another step removed from traditional Queen Anne style. “The person who saved the house had unique tastes,” Brown says.
Still, she and her husband, an attorney, were captivated by the home’s prominent front gable, wraparound porch and stamped metal roof. It had some good qualities inside, too, including old wood floors, high ceilings and beautiful stone walls in the basement.
To address the house’s shortcomings and restore coherence in the architecture, the couple hired Arlington-based Shutler Architects, a firm with extensive experience working on historic projects and navigating the world of review boards.
“This particular house had many evolutions,” says principal Rob Shutler. “That’s what was interesting about it. It started out as kind of Italianate, like you’d expect in a plantation mansion. And then it got added on to over a period of time. Each new style was appended to it, so there was an Edwardian piece that included a tall tower. During the Depression, they added a whole wing that was basically for a guesthouse.”
Given the hodgepodge of styles, the bulk of the restoration work involved “adding by subtracting.” Shutler downplayed the newer of the two towers by integrating its form into the house, and stripped away roof shingles to reveal sections of original painted metal.
The interiors were suffering from considerable deterioration. “The whole period of time when it wasn’t well maintained—like when it was a tenement house—there was a lot of stuff that had to be updated and brought back with new materials,” Shutler says. The team refreshed and enlarged the bathrooms, added closets, completely redid the kitchen and added new insulation.
Historic review boards tend to demand that architects refurbish and restore original windows, but this case was different. Due to energy-code requirements, the HALRB allowed Shutler to replace some of the home’s windows with new ones in certain areas. “They looked just like the old ones,” he says. “We made sure they were historically correct, but they were double-pane and insulated.”
The renovation also included some careful additions, such as a rear screened porch the HALRB deemed consistent with the home’s history, given that it already had a wide, wraparound porch.
Shutler says navigating the approval process at the county level—permits, variances and the review board—was relatively painless. The team did have to negotiate with one faction that wanted to distinguish anything new from what was old, and another that wanted the new work to blend in, but overall there was a cooperative spirit.
The project wasn’t all smooth sailing, though. The Browns ran into problems with the Commonwealth of Virginia when they applied for the federal and state historic rehabilitation tax credits (up to 20% and 25%, respectively) that they had been counting on to offset their remodeling expenses.
“I went down [to the office] a couple of times, and we hired a historical consultant,” Brown says, “[but] when we turned in our application, they rejected it. It wasted almost six months.”
The rejection was especially disappointing, Shutler says, because the state “led us to believe the whole time that what we were doing was within their guidelines.”
Six years later, those frustrations feel like ancient history. “It was bad at the time,” Brown says. “But I have to say, we have these beautiful spaces, and our screened porch is incredible. It’s nice for entertaining and just a nice place to be.”
The Project
Renovated in: 2018
Year Built: 1881
Neighborhood: Waycroft-Woodlawn
Square Footage:4,165
Architect: Rob Shutler | Shutler Architects
Contractor: Kingston Custom Homes