Lavish Home Ready to Move
Published April 2014
Price: $0 (must be moved)
Location: Riverside, California
Contact: Nathan Freeman, 951-826-5374
The History: In the mid-1880s, dry-goods merchant William Sweatt left rural Iowa to seek his fortune. He headed west, settling in Riverside, where he found success early, serving as the director of a bank and then opening a furniture business. This lavish Queen Anne, which he built with his wife, Nettie, in 1891, was to serve as a testament to just how far he’d come in the few short years since leaving home. Sadly, the good times didn’t last; Sweatt’s business collapsed in 1894, and he and Nettie divorced in 1897. Left alone in the 4,878-square-foot house, she divided it into apartments before moving to Los Angeles in 1902. Since then, the house has had over a dozen owners. In 2008, the city bought it so that it could be relocated and restored. But the city failed to find the funds to move the house and decided to offer the place to anyone willing to move it within Riverside, which would allow a local college to expand onto the lot.
Shown: The five-bedroom, four-bath house has a detailed exterior with decorative clapboard siding, a turret, and patterned brick chimneys.
Original Elaborate Exterior Details
Why Save It? The elaborate exterior retains many original details, including turned porch posts and a spindlework frieze. The inside is filled with elaborate millwork, wainscoting, and Lincrusta paneling.
Shown: A front porch wraps around the side of the house and is supported by elaborate turned posts.
When evaluating original millwork on a house of this era, This Old House contributor Hank Schmidt points out that the small flourishes are what set these homes apart: “The carving is gorgeous all the way through. This carving is something that you just don’t expect to find on an everyday house.”
Interior touches like Lincrusta paneling and wainscoting were often accompanied by other signatures of high-style Victorian craftsmanship. A This Old House Magazine profile of a comparable home highlighted how a living room’s “intricate floor medallion” and a mahogany staircase with fretwork echoing the medallion’s pattern can survive intact for decades—sometimes hidden beneath later carpeting—and need only refinishing to shine again.
Fluted Casings Intact
What it needs: In addition to a plot within the city limits—a nearby lot is available for $119,000—the house needs new systems and roof and wall repairs. It cannot be used as a rental, and the new owner must demolish an exterior apartment. Houses of this size in the area can fetch over a million dollars. Restoring this home to the showpiece it once was is a big job, to be sure, but one that’s well worth the effort.
Restoration projects of this scale often hinge on tight budgets and family stewardship. On a similar save, one homeowner told This Old House: “We’ve pretty much decided the best way to go. We’d like to save the house. We wanna put the money that we can afford to put into the house to restore it. And then, whether it stays in the family or whether it’s sold, it’ll always be here, for the family and for the community.”
Shown: A window bay with fluted casings. Many of the home’s windows are broken and covered with plywood.
Lasting Living Room Features
The living room is lavished with details including built-in cabinets, wainscoting, picture-rail molding, and Lincrusta paneling.
Original New Post and Balustrade
The staircase retains its mahogany newel post and balustrade.
Framed Stairway
The stairway is framed with an ornate spandrel.
Less-Formal Private Spaces
While the home’s public spaces feature more formal fluted casings with corner blocks, the simple boards with vertical grooves shown here seem to be reserved for rooms not seen by guests.
This kind of hierarchy in trim work was typical of the era. As one This Old House Magazine feature on a period home noted, Victorian-era casings could be “very ornate, depending on the wealth of the homeowner”—but in more modest houses, elegance was reserved for the few formal rooms guests would actually see.
