Intellectual Property Law

Life, Love, and an old house

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

Many Sivacracy readers remember the story of Karen Greene, the Dallas judge who passed away last year after fighting breast cancer for almost a decade. Karen's husband, journalist John Council, appears today in a lovely story in The Dallas Morning News:

Renovation was a labor of love--and loss-- for couple

07:31 PM CDT on Thursday, April 24, 2008

By PAIGE PHELPS / The Dallas Morning News
pphelps@dallasnew.com

When John Council bought his 1929 French eclectic house on Gaston Avenue, the inside was trashed. The hedges in the front yard were so tall you couldn't see the residence from the street. It smelled like "dirty diapers" inside, he says, but none of that mattered. "Ever since I was a teenager," says Mr. Council, "I've loved taking objects that are ugly and making them beautiful."

When John Council restored his 1929 Gaston Avenue house he did not realize how much the home would come to mean to his wife Karen Greene who succumbed to cancer there. As the one year anniversary of her death approaches he knows he must part with the house to go forward with his life.

After looking at "100 houses," Mr. Council and his fianc?, Karen Greene, a state district judge, walked in and knew it was perfect. They closed on the house in April 2003 and married in October.

"If there's one thing you need to know about this house, it's this: A lot of people buy houses as some sort of status symbol; for others, it's a financial investment. But we bought this house because we loved it, and we loved each other in it. And in the most important time in our lives, this house loved us back," says Mr. Council. "I mean, Karen came here to die."

Mr. Council, 40, a history buff and home restorer moonlighting as a senior reporter for Texas Lawyer, embarked on this restoration project with gusto. He already had a track record rehabbing his previous house, a Craftsman bungalow on nearby Tremont Street. For direction, he relied on A Field Guide to American Houses by Dallasites Virginia and Lee McAlester and a 1927 Sears Roebuck home kit catalog.

He found the original vintage fireplace tiles and bought a working O'Keefe and Merritt stove at a garage sale for $100. An appraiser recently confirmed the house's stained glass is a Rennie Mackintosh rose pattern.

Mr. Council learned everything he could about the house. He pulled the permits from the structure's remodel in 1942, found news clippings about previous owners, from influential Dallas doctors to the revolving door of "long-haired, chanting, spiritually centered counter-culture types" who christened the house Shepherd's Bush from 1970 until 1993. He even determined the house's original wall color by peeling back shoe molding to examine paint drippings from eras gone by.

But what he didn't know about his historic Gaston Avenue redo, what Mr. Council never could have known, is how his home's long history would be woven so significantly into the fabric of his own life.

After seven years in remission from stage 3B breast cancer and only four years into their marriage, Judge Greene was diagnosed with a cancer that attacked her nerves and diaphragm. Three months after the diagnosis, Mr. Council brought his wife back to their Gaston Avenue home to die, never leaving her side.

"The second most important thing I've ever done in my life was restore this house," says Mr. Council. "The first most important thing was to love Karen Greene." ...

Check out the video at the site.

Full post as published by SIVACRACY .NET on April 29, 2008 (boomark / email).