$450K King William home renovation honors home’s 100-year history

“Candid worked with us on our award-winning ranch outside of Utopia,” said Pam Duerr, a semiretired emergency room physician. “So we naturally thought of him when we bought this place.” 

Fixing up what has become known as the Cedar House took two years and about $450,000. The results earned Rogers’ firm, Candid-Works, a 2023 award for Best Remodeled Home-Limited from the San Antonio chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

While the renovation was near total and included removing an earlier extension and adding a primary suite to the back of the house, they retained several original features to celebrate the home’s authenticity.

“That’s one reason I wanted an old house,” said Pam Duerr. “I wanted to keep these little parts that show how the house was built and where it’s been.”

Rather than installing drywall over the wall between the dining area and the kitchen, for example, they left the rustic pine boards exposed. They did the same with the ceilings in the front foyer and in one of the bedrooms. 

“The wood isn’t shiplap,” Pam Duerr said of the trendy building style. “It’s stacked wood boards, which is how how these old houses were built.”

One window in the kitchen also remains unfinished, with several layers of paint  applied over the years  still visible, as if a worker had walked off the job before it was completed. But that was deliberate.

“There’s beauty in this idea of discovery while you’re renovating a historic home like this,” Rogers said. “There’s beauty in peeling back these layers of what was there before, of discovering these aspects of the original structure.”

More playfully, they also left the tin can lid that a previous owner had nailed over a hole in the wood floor rather than repairing it.

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While these unfinished and imperfect features might make some look twice, the couple says their friends don’t bat an eye.

“They know that’s just our style,” said James Duerr, who works in real estate. “We look at it as a kind of a celebration of the home’s history, a way of seeing how it’s been changed and altered over the years.”

It’s unknown exactly when the house was built. According to “Down the Acequia Madre,” published by the King William Association, what Rogers describes as a “gabled, neoclassical cottage” dates from “before 1910.” The earliest mention the Duerrs were able to find was a 1915 newspaper room-for-rent ad. 

The house previously had been cut up into apartments, and before they purchased it in 2017, it had been unoccupied for several years. Two-by-4s propped up the front porch, and the kitchen hadn’t been upgraded since the 1960s or ’70s.

But the three-bedroom, two-bath house had plenty of potential.

“Certainly, the primary structure of the house was in good shape,” Rogers said. “We only had to clean up the original pine boards that we left exposed, and most of the trim and moldings and windows are original.”

Like many turn-of-the-20th-century homes, the house originally had a large, formal entry foyer, the better for hanging up jackets, shawls and, back when everyone wore them, hats.

But at some point — perhaps when it was subdivided — a part of the foyer was closed off to create space for a closet in an adjoining bedroom. During the most recent renovation, however, the couple undid that work and returned the foyer to its original size.

“We’d rather have a nice big entryway than a closet in the other room,” Pam Duerr said. 

In the kitchen, they added a farmhouse sink, glass door cabinets with reproductions of classic pulls and patterned cement tile flooring.

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“I didn’t want anything too modern, but I wanted it to be functional,” Pam Duerr said. “We use the kitchen a lot because we mainly eat in.”

They bucked conventional wisdom and installed marble countertops. 

“People kept telling me, you don’t want marble counters because they stain and pit,” she said. “And I’d tell them, I was in Italy and they have marble counters in the coffee shops that are more than a hundred years old. They may not be perfect, but I like them.”

Although the house sits on a fairly narrow lot, it was deep enough for Rogers to design a 600-square-foot addition in the rear to create a primary suite consisting of a bedroom, a walk-in closet and a well-designed bath area. 

To reach the completely modern suite, one first has to walk down a short hallway, which is framed by large windows on either side.

“When we build something new that’s attached to something historic, we want to do it sensitively,” Rogers explained. 

The hallway ensures that one is made aware of the transition between the old and the new, including the windows that  make visible the original part of the house from this newer space.

Clerestory windows above the bed allow filtered, natural light to stream in through the neighbor’s pomegranate trees, which also increase the room’s privacy.

“These and other windows in the suite make you constantly aware of the changing seasons,” Roger said. “Given this house is in an urban neighborhood, it’s important to have this connection to the outdoors.”

Beyond the double-sided closet — one side for him, the other for her — is a relatively small but cleverly designed bath that manages to fit in a soaking tub, water closet and walk-in shower without feeling cramped. The strategically placed windows, including one low to the tub to let in light while maintaining privacy, help ensure this feeling of spaciousness.

“Overall, it was a very tight fit,” Rogers said. “Finding a place for everything was the goal, and I think we did that fairly well.”