With the meticulous renovation of a stone house built in 1926, a talented team preserves a timeless press of Tahoe’s West Shore history

Umberto Sprellio pictured with his masonry on the original home

This year’s Outstanding Home transcends categories. Historic Restoration, Remodel, Craftsmanship, Tahoe Style? Ultimately, the home’s unique story and top-notch execution captivated the judging panelists, who put it in the spotlight for the 22^nd Annual TQ Mountain Home Awards.

“Exceptional,” gushed one panelist. “A killer tie-in!”

“You don’t see 100-year-old homes in the Tahoe Basin being restored these days,” said another.

“It says something potent,” commented a third, “that all the choices they made about the renovations and the addition … were totally defined by the sensibility and aesthetic of the existing house … highlighting the simple things that made the house awesome in the first place.”

The homeowners purchased the historic house in 2015 and began planning its transformation into a modern-amenities vacation home, while still preserving its 1920s charm. It was a project of exceptional challenges. If they were going to remodel and add on to the one-and-a-half-bedroom structure, all materials and finishes had to be a perfect match to the existing, historic elements or sound an off note, fade the charm.

“We knew we wanted to do it right the first time,” says the owner. The couple enlisted the help of architect David Michael Madsen with Reno’s KRI Architecture & Design and general contractor Brent Welling of Tahoe City’s Welling Construction.

“Brent has a surpassing attention to detail,” the owner says. “He brought our ideas to life.”

The original home pictured from the lake side

The project would add a two-story addition with a primary suite, guest bedroom and bathroom, and a crawl space for modern utilities. Since the original structure had less than a foot of crawl space, Welling pulled up all the flooring and supports and poured concrete slabs inside the stone walls, with embedded ducts and conduits connected to the addition. Footings were poured for new structural steel supports for the old roof and ceiling, bringing the historic building up to code and allowing for a redesign of the interior into a modern great room layout. 

Every room then needed new oak flooring and many elements replaced, redesigned and modernized, with the owner and Welling’s team keeping things true to the home’s 1920s soul.

“Throughout, the owners wanted to keep the historic feel,” says Welling. “When we came up with solutions, they were all in with the creative ideas to keep this historical look.” 

The home is undeniably part of West Shore history. It is one of four stone houses clustered near the lake that employed the talents of Italian mason Umberto Sprellio, including the stone house where critical scenes of The Godfather: Part II were filmed, located in Fleur de Lac Estates.

The project team was careful to preserve the home’s original charm while adding a second level

Sprellio finished his work on the home in 1926. Henry Droste was the original owner and when completed it was the last house on Cedar Avenue, the old road down the West Shore. Known as the “Card House,” visitors included industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, who purchased lakefront property nearby. Sprellio had subsequently built two adjacent stone homes, including the former Chaney House Bed & Breakfast on Highway 89. Kaiser admired Sprellio’s work and hired him to be head stonemason for the signature home of his new estate. Four decades later, the windows in Sprellio’s walls framed Al Pacino in classic scenes of American cinema.

The Card House was passed down through the decades to Droste’s descendants, who through marriage became the Walker family, with Johnny Walker the most recent owner. When the present owners purchased it, they envisioned a new life for the home’s second century to ensure it stayed a cherished family retreat for future generations.

The home’s original stone arch built in the 1920s remains on the property

Their redesign of the home’s main living spaces included the removal of an interior stone wall, which created additional space for a modern kitchen. The removed stone was incorporated by mason Paul Johansen in what was perhaps the project’s most daunting task: matching the weathered stone and mortar of the historic home to the addition’s new stone walls wrapping its lower story, and in walls enclosing an outdoor patio.

Johansen is a lifelong Tahoe resident and third-generation stonemason who relishes every opportunity to work on historic structures. 

“I was excited to get the call from Brent,” he says. “Projects like this are so hard because you are trying to recreate something 100 years old and weathered. But you’re stoked because the homeowners aren’t tearing it down!”

Johansen has done restoration work on several historic structures in the Tahoe Basin. He and his brother Leif learned their trade under their father Al Johansen, and the family has remained prominent Tahoe stonemasons for decades.

Johansen says the stone used in the historic home was locally quarried basalt, perhaps from the same zone as a current rockslide above the Tahoe Pines neighborhood. He scoured the home’s property for smaller stones he could use in the new walls and repurposed several “cherry-picked stones” from the interior walls, a pinkish porphyritic andesite reportedly found in volcanic flows from Mount Watson near Tahoe City.

“Matching the texture and look of the 90-year-old mortar is the hardest part,” Johansen says. “Sprellio used a heavy-grain sand that I suspect came from Meeks Bay.” Experimentation yielded a mortar indistinguishable from the original.

Additional challenges included cutting through the existing 17-inch-thick stone wall to create a doorway connecting to the addition’s first floor. To keep the historic appearance of the exterior seamless, Johansen created new masonry around the gas meter, hot tub and outdoor kitchen. Throughout, he matched Sprellio’s style of masonry: use of cube-cut, “quoin” blocks stacked at corners and around doors and window frames, with more organic-shaped stones embedded in the mortar in the spaces in between.

To reach the primary suite on the upper floor, blacksmith 
Matt Lund fabricated a spiral staircase that incorporates metal framework and precisely fitting oak treads

The jewel of Sprellio’s masonry in the home is the large freestanding fireplace in the great room and its swirling volcanic textures. The fireplace and the room’s other original elements—a huge wrought iron chandelier, pine ceiling and the old front door—create “a marker of its time,” as one judge noted, and set the mark for the rest of the home’s décor.

The artistry of this project is that much of what appears historic in the home is, in fact, brand new. Welling’s team built, fabricated, restored and stained their way to, at times, difficult creative solutions, enthusiastically supported by the owners at each step of the process

“A goal of the project was to bring the finishes to the same era as the original build,” says Welling. “This did not allow for standard building techniques.”

The owner consulted with interior designers Guillemette Berard-Johnson and Ana Lia Grayden of Truckee-Tahoe Lumber Design Center. Rocky Mountain Hardware was enlisted to fabricate new front door lock and latch mechanisms, working from the originals, and to produce wrought iron elements prominent throughout the home. Marv Newton of Rustic Elegance created new lighting fixtures.

Blacksmith Matt Lund’s work is front and center in the great room in the new fireplace doors he designed, as well as in the kitchen, where the range iron wall protector is half decorative and a half-hidden spice cabinet.

The two new steel supports in the great room are exposed: square black channels that fit surprisingly well in the wrought iron–accented space. Additional steel supports for the roof are hidden behind the room’s two-story wall, their installation requiring the removal of most of the wall’s classic pickled pine paneling, 70 percent of which was severely distressed. Welling’s team rejuvenated what they could and ordered custom lumber from a mill to replace the rest, as well as custom lumber needed for new floors, walls and ceilings throughout the project. 

In the kitchen, a subtle curve in the marble-topped island allowed space for three stools

Erin Kelly of Kelly Brothers Painting created finishings for the house, matching the look of the new construction to the historic walls and ceilings. “Erin nailed it,” says the owner.  

Precise carpentry was a necessary part of the magic. The original paneling band around the great room was replaced to incorporate concealed indirect LED lighting, which flows through the web of the new steel supports. Mating the new wood floor to the old stone walls required grinding a groove into the rock wall that the oak flooring could slide into.

Forced air heating was installed through the house instead of a hydronic system because the owners live close enough that they want to heat the house quickly if they decide to visit spur of the moment. The home’s original electric black wall heating registers were left in the great room for historic purposes, however, connected to nothing, while new Reggio floor registers carry the real heat.

In the dining room, hot-rolled steel casing was used around the new windows to maintain the natural era of materials while keeping the focus on the stone walls

“We wanted a rustic style for the home that matched the stone,” says Berard-Johnson, “but not too rustic.” Rocky Mountain Hardware and oak cabinets by Brentwood set the kitchen tone, with subtle diamond shapes present in the hardware there and throughout the home. Carrara marble countertops, glass tile and white wood paneling lighten the space. 

“We tried to mix textures and bring polished surfaces into play,” says Berard-Johnson.

The owner chose a rich blue color for the kitchen island cabinets because, “I wanted to relate to the blues in the lake.” She requested that the island seat three, but space was limited, shared between the kitchen and passage from the back door into the home. The solution was to add a curve to the island’s outline that allowed for better flow, while fitting three stools.

A sliding barn door divides the great room from the sleeping quarters of the house and addition. Inside the historic footprint, a hall bath has a textured metal mirror frame created by Lund that interfaces exquisitely with the stones of the wall. Glass tile forms a simple design on the shower wall, feeling both 1920s-era and yet somehow modern, its green color echoed in the Taj Mahal quartzite counter.

Ceiling beams wrapped in oak meet in a star shape in the primary bedroom addition

In a hallway to a guest bedroom, an opening in the rock wall that was once a window is now a laundry cabinet. A former doorway through the rock in the guest bedroom is now a closet. 

The architecture of the addition blends with the historic home and adds to its overall presence. The addition’s dormer roof lines are balanced on the home’s opposite corner by a new back door entry roof. The tall wall of stone on its downhill side, enclosing the basement and first floor and topped by the master suite and its peaked roof, creates a towering presence viewed from below (the traditional entrance to the house).

The first floor of the addition is a guest room and bathroom. To reach the upper floor’s primary suite, Lund fabricated a metal spiral staircase with inset oak treads to fit in a small space within the historic footprint. 

A large picture window in the primary bedroom looks out through the forest toward the lake. 

“It feels very private,” says the owner. “Our little tree house.” 

The view out the window would have been different in the 1920s, with no homes between it and Lake Tahoe and the forest recovering from the clear-cutting 40 years prior. Now the trees of this West Shore neighborhood are large, and the views from every room look out to thick tree trunks.

Oak-wrapped ceiling beams in the primary bedroom meet in a star shape, joined with black steel hangers that carry on the wrought iron theme. There’s a sitting area and a trundle bed, and the bathroom has a 1920s-style toilet. 

On the outside, the second floor of the home features aged ghostwood siding under a rustic metal roof. A clever layer of siding hides the home’s ventilation hardware. Ghostwood also sheaths a tiny guesthouse designed to complement the main home.

To get the new entryway to blend in seamlessly with the original house, Brent Welling’s team incorporated exposed resawn beams and carried over the rusty metal roof from the main house

New outdoor lights were cut into the historic rock wall of the large front porch. Black steel posts conceal power lines to a new bear mat by the original front door.

A reimagined back patio off the great room wraps around a giant granite boulder, with Johansen’s new masonry walls creating a seamless connection to the Sprellio stone walls they face.

Modern craftsmanship and design have created a home that truly leaps centuries—a triumph of many details and talented hands.

“It’s a house built to last forever,” says Welling.

“We call it our old new house,” says the owner, adding that they use the home “often.”

“It ranks toward the top of historical projects I’ve worked on,” says Johansen. “I’m always stoked to work on a true historic cabin on the West Shore. This project was the best of those.”

Award: Outstanding

Building Design: KRI Architecture & Design

Builder: Welling Construction

Interior Design: Truckee-Tahoe Lumber Design Center; Welling Construction; Owners

Landscape Design: Owners

Square Feet: 2,528