Can you go home again? Some try in childhood homes

14—Lewistown, PA
The Sentinel, Thursday, Sept. 17, The Neighbors, Saturday, Sept. 19, 2009
Can you go home again?
Some try in childhood homes
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 8
Erika Goldman and her architect husband, Charles Giraudet, have reinvented much of the Brooklyn
brownstone where she grew up. The
changes have been both sweeping —
the couple uses some rooms differently than did her late parents, who rented out some
of them — and painstaking, like the paint removal that unmasked stenciled friezes from
the 1840 house's early years.
Still there is some of her parents' Danish modern furniture, mingling with the couple's own stuff. Goldman feels some rooms are overcrowded but can't bear to exile her
parents' pieces, contenting herself with giving them a new context.
"On the one hand, I wanted to be free of ghosts ... but on the other hand, it's hard to
let go," the publishing executive said.
Putting family possessions in storage can be a start in parsing mixed feelings, says
Lancaster, Pa.-based designer Sharon Hanby-Robie.
If parents can be consulted about renovations, should they be? After all, no one who's
paying a mortgage wants to feel like a teenager asking for the keys to Dad's car.
Designers do advise some effort to make parents feel that their taste and stewardship are respected: arranging a portrait or walkthrough video of the home before
changes are made, or keeping a few things they prize.
Such mementoes lend a space "personality ... and you maintain that legacy," says designer Kerrie Kelly, who lives with her sister in their late grandmother's former condominium in Sacramento, Calif. Before their grandmother died, the sisters renovated
extensively but highlighted her ukulele collection and other curios they came to appreciate through her reminiscences.
Back in Carthage, about 80 miles northeast of Syracuse, Mary Beth Renaud has altered both her house and her parents' perspective.
They gasped, yes, when she painted the cherry-wood kitchen cabinets a creamy yellow to harmonize with Venetian plaster that had replaced dark paneling. But they eventually embraced the new look there and elsewhere, said Renaud, who works at an
advertising firm.
The ultimate proof: When she ditched an old cast-iron bathtub for a Jacuzzi model,
"my mother said to my father, 'How come we didn't do that when we lived there?'"
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.