The Collegian

Issue date: 3/12/09 Section: Beyond

Every morning Professor of Religion Tom Burke and his wife Elizabeth sit in their sunroom, look out on Broad Street and eat their breakfast. A red and green porcelain bird watches them, perched on the room's light fixture. He is one of many unique features of their house, and he's watched them reclaim feature after feature in their 12-year remodeling project.

Ever since they moved into their dream house in 1994, the Burkes have been sanding, scraping, restoring and decorating. In 2006 they considered themselves finished - they had reached the point where they did not have a contractor in the house every day.

The result: a beautiful, richly colored, genuine home of Spanish architecture and Victorian decor.

Books fill mahogany cases in the study. Old family portraits dot walls and corners. Long drapes frame every window, reaching almost to the 11-foot-high ceilings.

The house is so inviting and attractive that acquaintances ask the Burkes if they may use it for tea parties or college faculty gatherings. Tom and Elizabeth happily oblige them.

"Because it's just the two of us, so we feel it gets used that way," Elizabeth said.

Her house, 19 S. Broad St., was built in 1867 as an average Victorian house by the Stock family, whose name appears on Stock's Mill and Stock's Park in Hillsdale. In the 1930s Harold Stocks, a Hillsdale College alumnus, remade the house in the Spanish style, replacing windows, moving out the north wall six feet and adding a family room.

The house traded hands and was rented out in the following years, during which the dining room was used as a bedroom and almost of all the woodwork was painted.

Then the Burkes reclaimed the house, room by room. It wasn't easy. The first winter they camped out in one room only, with warmth from a kerosene heater, sitting in lawn chairs in front of the fireplace.

They sanded every painted surface in order to bring the woodwork to light. They knocked out a wall of the downstairs bedroom in order to return it to its original status as the dining room. They replaced floorboards, the roof and broken-down steel-framed sunroom windows with replicas.

Elizabeth decorated.

"I do precious little... except pay for it," Tom said.

The Burkes also restored some of the house's quirks. The basement study features original porthole windows and ship lights - builder Stocks was a fan of seafaring. The kitchen is also conspicuously missing a refrigerator; instead an old-fashioned ice box, camouflaged in wooden paneling, holds the Burke's cold items.

The house has four bedrooms and five full bathrooms. Three bathrooms are upstairs, one in the basement, and one adjoins the dining room, but can also be accessed by a closet near the entryway.

Behind the house, Stocks built a four-car garage, with one part larger for his limousine.

"When I get a limo, that's where I'll put it," Tom said, eyes twinkling. "Right now it's full of wheelbarrows."

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