Phoenix Rising

Civic-minded homeowners help resurrect a 1903 house in the heart of downtown, enlivening it with color and pattern to spare.

- Deborah Baldwin

Four years ago, Caroline Van Slyke was at a meeting in downtown Phoenix when she looked out the window, saw a forlorn little house, and decided “it needed some love,” she says. “It was like the house was speaking to me, telling me to adopt it. I know it sounds crazy.”

Today, the old Tharaldson house—now the Van Slyke place—is a must-see on the annual neighborhood house tour, and its lively new terrace is something of a local watering hole, complete with an 8-foot-tall wood-burning pizza oven crowdfunded by happy regulars.

The story of how all this came to be is one of personal renewal, urban renewal, and homage to the city’s pre-statehood days.

While very much a modern metropolis, Phoenix has lately trained its sights on its old downtown and its shrinking supply of neoclassical cottages, some abandoned so long ago they became wards of the city. The one Caroline spotted was just 1,733 square feet, with a sagging front porch, on a bare lot. It sits in the Roosevelt historic district; a leafy streetcar subdivision when the 1903 house was built, it was a shrinking dot in the urban orb by the 1970s.

Walk by the house today and it’s hard to believe this is the same one Caroline fell for. The porch stands erect, its fluted columns freshly painted, its front door an upbeat apple green. Step inside and you find high-ceilinged rooms finished with period trim and warm, old-world touches, “like the macaron shops in Paris,” says Caroline, a self-confessed Francophile.