You don't have to be a child to appreciate the magical possibilities of a big, rambling mansion. When house-hunting couple Chris DeWitt and Oscar Yague discovered Pont Reading, a huge old house in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, in 2003, they were intrigued by its pedigree—the 1683 colonial-style building 10 miles west of Philadelphia is on the National Registry of Historic Places—and enchanted by its character. With long hallways that run at not-quite-right angles, two staircases, and three stories that sit at different levels in different parts of the structure, the eight-bedroom house has a quirky storybook charm (and plenty of nooks and crannies for games of hide-and-seek). So DeWitt and Yague purchased Pont Reading and set about creating a home for their son, Lucas, who was born in June 2006 by surrogate. For the couple, the key was to make the place practical for a 21st-century family while layering in their own idiosyncratic blend of modern and old-world style in a way that enhanced, rather than overshadowed, the place's personality.
"Everyone who ever lived in Pont Reading has had respect for it," says DeWitt, 40, who until recently ran Free People, a division of Urban Outfitters. "We didn't want to be the people who came in and screwed it up." Today, if the original 17th-century resident were to walk through the halls, he would be proud of his former home: The couple have turned the property into a functional, decidedly unprecious home where babies, grandparents, and guests always feel comfortable, where dogs can (and do) lounge, and where Lucas will one day romp around with crayons in hand.
But making the house hospitable to the diaper-bottomed instead of the bustle-skirted was no effortless transformation. "It looked like a museum where you could imagine old ladies in costumes," says Yague, 36, a buyer for Anthropologie's home department. The house had a leaky old roof, antiquated bathrooms, and no central air, while its three acres of gardens required serious pruning and replanting. DeWitt and Yague set about modernizing in unobtrusive ways (when you're dealing with a house from the 1600s, the entire concept of modernizing is relative), keeping original doors and windows wherever possible, but avoiding traditional treatments like valances and velvet curtains. They have not done any major renovations to the pine-plank floors, nor have they knocked down many walls, and to maintain the spirit of the original structure, they embraced the charm of mismatched living levels. They inserted their unique multiera furnishings (a baroque daybed from Italy, an early-20th-century lion-skin rug from eBay) alongside the colonial architecture. On top of it all is a layer of Lucas's stuff—predominantly circa 2006.
