Young at Heart

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A couple and first-time homebuyers wanting to put down roots find their perfect match—and renovation opportunity—in a 1913 St. Paul home that now has a youthful spirit.

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Buying a house for the first time can cause a roller coaster of emotions—excitement, pride, anxiety, fear. Nicholas Reiter and Natalie Mouilso experienced all the extremes after purchasing a 1913 house in the heart of St. Paul’s Macalester-Groveland neighborhood.

First came the excitement. Their plan to move from New York City back to the Midwest to be close to family seemed to be falling into place. As the couple talked through their vision for the house, Nicholas, an architect, designed plans for a renovation. Natalie, who worked in the art world and now works in community and economic development in the nonprofit sector, has an eye for interior design and began imagining surfaces and paint colors to give the old home new life.

Then came the fear. About a week after the renovation started, and as the couple continued to job-hunt from afar, the pandemic hit. Not only were they living in a city on the front lines of a major health crisis, construction everywhere halted or slowed—followed by supply issues—and the stock market crashed. “We thought we had lit all the money we had on fire,” Nicholas says.

And, finally, the happiness. The work got done (the house being vacant was a silver lining that allowed workers to stagger schedules). They made the move, eager to add the finishing touches to the first phase of the renovation and put down roots in the house, which is just a mile away from Nicholas’s sister and on the same street where his dad grew up.

The home’s character initially attracted the couple to the classic two-story with a wide front porch. Surprisingly, they were also fine that the house needed updates, inside and out. “We were definitely looking for a project,” Natalie says. “If you walk into a house and everything has already been updated but it’s not your style, it can be difficult to rationalize pulling everything out and starting over.”

Adds Nicholas, “We wanted it to be ours and have personality. But we also wanted to keep the original details and have this beautiful marriage of old and new, modern and period.”

A big part of the renovation’s first phase focused on the kitchen, which was gutted. Removing a wall opened the space to the dining room and allowed for a peninsula with seating. Terrazzo speckled with blue, black, pink, and gold clads the peninsula and base cabinets and became the inspiration for the pops of color that thread throughout the home. “It’s a showstopper,” Nicholas says. “People would walk in and just stare at it.”

Nicholas’s architectural design also factored in shortcomings common to old houses. Dead space under the stairs became a much-needed hall closet just off the kitchen. Knowing that ceilings in old houses are rarely level, he stopped kitchen cabinets three inches from the ceiling, which made installation easier while still maximizing the amount of storage. An auto-body paint coats the flat panel fronts for a durable lacquered finish.

One typically tough decision in an old home is whether or not to paint stained moldings and built-ins. Most of the original built-ins and millwork, as well as the bricks on the fireplace, had already been painted, so the couple’s decision was made for them. Rather than strip the paint to take the wood back to its natural state, they freshened with either a crisp white or a bold blue that punctuates features on the main level.

Upstairs, a few walls shifted to create a more straightforward flow from the hallway into bedrooms and to gain closet space. Thinking ahead to a future renovation, Nicholas also reworked the staircase to the attic so it’s accessed from the hallway. The most noticeable change, though, was with the lone bathroom. The couple reconfigured the inefficient layout and maximized the room’s function and modern form, including adding a trough sink with double faucets and rosy-pink tiles inspired by the kitchen countertops.

After the interior renovation, attention turned to the exterior, where Nicholas mixed different types of siding and materials for textural interest. Now, when they enjoy the quiet of the grassy backyard or sit on the front porch watching the neighborhood, the uncertainties the couple faced when they bought the house seem like a distant memory. “Buying this house turned out to be one of the best decisions we’ve made in life,” Nicholas says.