The historical journey a Greensboro civic organization embarked on last year ended with a successful renovation of a more than 150-year-old home and a new headquarters for the group.
The Junior League of Greensboro’s project on the 3,200-square-foot Albright House at 3101 West Friendly Ave. was recorded in a Triad Homes story last spring. We’re taking another pictorial view of the now-finished home, which the group moved into in September.
The undertaking was a truly collective effort that included not only the Junior League, but also the Starmount Co., the Benjamin family, Preservation Greensboro Inc., and local building and design companies. The home had to be gutted when work began in April 2008, with radiators, pipes, electrical units and plaster removed. The project cost $570,000, including the addition of a parking lot and driveway, and will be paid for through grants, donations and financing. That total does not include the more than $200,000 in donated materials, furnishings and labor that also went toward the restoration of the house across the street from Friendly Center.
In 2007 the Starmount Co. donated the two-story house and site to the Junior League, which in turn agreed to give 5 acres of the property to the Friends of Greensboro Parks & Recreation Foundation for use as a passive park.
Members of the Junior League, a charitable organization, consider the renovation an extension of their community outreach efforts.
Architectural style: I-House form and Italianate style (The I-House form, popular in various regions in the 19th century, is typically two stories, two rooms wide and one room deep.)
History: The house was built around 1850 by Daniel E. Albright and owned by members of his family for about 50 years. Sometime between 1928 and 1932 the property was purchased by Blanche S. Benjamin, who moved the house to its current location. She sold it to W.H. and Helen Hunt Seburn in 1938. The Seburn family owned the house until 1967, when it was sold to the Starmount Co. (Note: Kate Zylstra, a UNCG graduate student, has researched the home’s history in an effort to get it on the study list for consideration as a nominee to the National Register of Historic Places. )
Renovations likely made to the house in the 1920s resulted in the addition of oak floors, the portico and columns, and rooms.
Original location: Area near Wesley Long Community Hospital on North Elam Avenue
Landscaping: Junior League member and landscape designer Alexa Aycock, with The Garden Collection, researched plantings that would have been used when the house was built in the 1800s.
Aycock included the following plants in the landscape design: boxwoods, camellias, dogwoods, gardenias, hydrangeas, natural ferns and rhododendrons
Features of the renovated home:
Portico with neoclassical columns and oak floors (all believed to have been added in the 1920s); the oak covers the original pine floors
Daylight (above-ground) basement
New cedar exterior siding
New front porch in Pennsylvania bluestone by Scott Stone
New parking lot and driveway
Design notes:
• The design and color palette were intended to create a classic, elegant and timeless house, according to Daniela Helms with the Junior League. The decisions were based on style and efforts to make the home as maintenance-free and energy efficient as possible.
That included the paint color and brand. The rooms are painted in muted shades of green and taupe with environmentally friendly paints from Sherwin-Williams that emit less odor and few toxins.
• Original pine was restored and used on the stairwell wall in the foyer and in a ceiling accent in the downstairs reception office. Because the oak flooring and stairsteps from the 1920s renovation were in good shape they were refinished.
• The side porch and portico, also added in the 1920s remodel, were replaced to meet current code requirements but built to maintain the design.
Among key players in the project:
• Interior designer Jane Matteson, of Jane Matteson Design and a Junior League member
• Kitchen and bath designer Anna Hilliard Smith, of Elements of Style Interiors and a Junior League member
• Construction manager Kevin Pegram, of Starmount Residential
• Architects Carl Myatt and Shermin Ata
