Today’s episode is about Mark LePage’s cottage renovation in Chappaqua. You can see the episode enhancements here.

KM: Mark, I appreciate you coming on today. I can’t wait to hear what you have to tell me about.

ML: I’m really excited about this. I have not had an opportunity to talk about anything but Entre Architect in eight years.

KM: Well, I’m really excited to have you here, Mark. So I’m hoping to hear a really exciting story about your cottage renovation.

ML: Oh, I would love to do that, I would love to do that. My house in New York was a 1934, I guess you could call it a Tudor style. We used to just call it a little cottage in the woods. When we bought it, it was a 900 square foot house, 30 by 30 square. It was a very small house. At the time it was 1997. I got married to Ann Marie, my wife in 1996. Ann Marie is also an architect. And so that plays into the story quite a bit because we got married in 1996, we moved into the apartment that she was living in and started looking for a house, and never imagined that we would- we never even looked in Chappaqua where the house is, where we finally bought. Chappaqua is a pretty high-end place, you know, a lot of expensive homes, so we never even looked there. We didn’t think we could afford there. So we looked everywhere but there, and looked for over a year, because two architects have a very specific list and we want a very specific type of house. And so nothing really resonated with us. Everything we found was not what we were looking for. We had a list of things that we wanted, we had a whole wishlist of things we wanted, and we had a very understanding and patient realtor who did a fantastic job.

KM: Yeah, I’ve had a few of those myself.

ML: She kept finding great little houses and she almost always knew they weren’t right for us, cause she knew very well what we were looking for. It’s over a year we looked and then one day she showed us a house in Millwood, which is actually in the same town. Chappaqua is a Hamlet and the town is Newcastle in New York, Westchester County, about 40 minutes North of New York city. So it’s an executive commuter town, a lot of people who work in the city live in Newcastle, and Millwood is the other Hamlet in Newcastle. And so she showed us a house and it wasn’t right. It was a cute little house, but it was right under the power lines, big high tension power lines. We’re like, nope, we’re going to have a family, we’re not taking the risk that we’re gonna run our family under high tension power lines. We don’t know if anything’s true or not about high tension power lines, but we weren’t going to take that chance with our future family. And they weren’t very pretty, and we were worried that resale wasn’t going to help with power lines in your backyard. It was a cool house and somebody eventually bought it and renovated it, and it was a nice house. But that led us into Newcastle. And then the next weekend, the realtor sent us an email saying, I just found out that a house in Chappaqua is going on the market, they’re having an open house on Sunday and I just got access to the house on Saturday before- it goes on the market Saturday, open house on Sunday. So we got the first viewing of the house. And she picks us up on Saturday and drives us over to the house. And we’re like, no, this is Chappaqua. There’s no way this house is going to be affordable, we’re never going to be able to afford this house. And she turns into this road, which ends up being a private driveway that’s shared by three or four houses, goes up a hill into the woods. So now we’re driving into the woods of Chappaqua, and as we come up the hill, we see this stucco house on the right side, a little cottage. And we both look at each other, we look at the house, the house has a round top door. And we looked at each other and said, this is it. We didn’t even step in the house yet.

KM: I know, you get that feeling. You just know when you see the house, somehow.

ML: We were home. It was overgrown and falling apart, and we looked right past all of that. It was a disaster. And so we both knew it was the house. So we got a tour, we opened the front door with the realtor and somehow the people who owned it were still there. Like they hadn’t left yet.

KM: They were there physically in the house?

ML: They were physically in the house while we walked into the house and they sort of just pretended they weren’t there. And we sort of pretended they weren’t there because they weren’t supposed to be there. And we were the first ones there. And so they were trying to clean up. And when you hear what the house was like, cleaning up wasn’t going to help at all. We’d walk in and there’s three feet of their life covering the floors and it wasn’t necessarily a hoarding situation, it was just their life sort of built up around them. It turned out that they were very nice people. We actually still communicate with them, we send them Christmas cards and stuff. But they were estate sale people, that was their job, that was their business, they ran estate sales. And so whatever didn’t sell ended up in their house. They basically used their house as a warehouse, but it was like, Junk. It was all this stuff that nobody wanted. It was literally three feet, so these little paths that you had to walk through to get through the house. So anybody who walked into the house would think, Oh my goodness, what a disaster, how could you even, you know, it smelled of that moldy grease. We walk into the living room and then we walk through the living room into a little door that goes into this little tiny dining niche, just big enough for a little table and two chairs. And we walk into the quote-unquote kitchen, and the kitchen is the original 1934 kitchen. So it is a wooden cupboard and a built-in ceramic sink, no refrigerator. The refrigerator was there, but it was basically in the middle of the room because there was no room. It wasn’t built in 1934, it wasn’t built for a refrigerator. And it had like a 1940 Gas stove, and it was full of grease. Everything was covered in that grease, like this coating of grease and it smelled horrible and the floor was black. It was some sort of linoleum that just, you know, hadn’t been cleaned and forever. The windows were all full of grease, it was hard to see through the windows.

KM: Honestly though, that sounds perfect. You were probably looking at it thinking like, this is awesome!

ML: Exactly, that is exactly right, Katherine. Ann Marie and I were so happy, so happy because we looked right past the trash. Two architects knew exactly what we were looking at. The house had not been touched since the seventies. We found out later that the husband who bought the house had passed away in the seventies, and in the seventies, when the husband passed away, the wife and the mother of the- cause of the son and his wife lived with the mom, that’s who was living in the house. So when the husband passed away in the seventies, she didn’t want anybody to touch the house. This was his house and no one was going to touch the house. And so it was never updated. It was never repaired, it was nothing since 1970, until 1997 when we purchased it. They were the second buyers, they bought it in 1940 from the original builder, the original builder was a doctor from New York city who built it as a little cottage in the country. In 1934 it was an apple orchard, nothing there. Chappaqua existed, Chappaqua has been around since the colonial days, but there was no new development at all. So this was one of the original homes in the area, and it was a vacation house, it was a place in the mountains to go. And it wasn’t intended to be a full time living house, that’s why the kitchen and dining room were insignificant. It was a two bedroom house, so two bedroom, one bathroom, living room, a little tiny dining area and a kitchen. And then a full basement, no attic. It was a single floor but it was on a hill, and so it was a full basement. And we looked right past the trash, we looked right past the grease and the smell, and we saw the original hardware from 1934 on all the doors. We saw the original light fixtures from the house all still installed and working, all the original plaster crown molding was there. All the walls were textured plaster, mostly still intact. Some of them, you know, three years of some neglect on the roof, there were some leaks, and so there was some serious damage and some significant mold issues from past problems with the roof. The roof was relatively new, so they had fixed the roof somewhere along the line in order to fix the leaks. But it was a dream come true. Because it was in the condition that it was, it was just out of our price range, but it was affordable if we stretched. And it was an acre of property, an acre in Chappaqua.

KM: Nice, that’s a lot. 

ML: It is a lot. And it was actually technically two lots. So they were selling the house, which was on a little quarter acre lot, and then it also owned a three-quarter adjacent lot. That basically you didn’t know it was two lots, it just was never joined together as one lot. And so there were two lots and it was on this private road up in the trees. When you looked at the backyard, it was completely overgrown, like a jungle. But once we bought the house and we sort of cleared away the overgrowth, we kept finding remnants of the old garden, all the stone planters were there. So the original owner, the husband used to build planters and waterfalls. And you can see that, if you imagine that the overgrowth, if you sort of look at the plantings, you realize, oh, these were once little tiny plants that were part of a garden that just over 40 years have grown into these monster plants and turned into a forest. So we bought it. Actually, that’s a great part of the story is that we put in an offer on it, said we were going to, we made an agreement. We went that day, we were the first ones in, we made an agreement, essentially, a verbal handshake agreement, no actual contract, no deposit.

KM: You mean with the people who were just cleaning up the living room inside, you just went in and said hey we want the house?

ML: Yes. We didn’t negotiate with them because the realtors didn’t want us to talk to them, the realtors all want their piece. Which I agree, you know, they did their work. Especially our realtor really earned her fee. And so that night we put the offer in that night before anybody else saw the house, we got the agreement. The next day, their realtor convinced them to go through with the open house, even after they accepted our offer. The next day they had their open house and they got three offers. Two of them were cash offers for more than our offer from builders who looked at the property and said an acre in Chappaqua with a tear down house, this is a gold mine. And they didn’t want to sell it because we told them that we were going to restore it. We told them that we have two architects, two young architects, we were 29 years old, we were going to restore this and make this our family home. And they said, that’s what we want. We love this house, it’s a piece of us. It’s sad for us to leave. They didn’t want to leave, Chappaqua grew up around them, they’d had it since the seventies. It was a completely different world now. Very expensive high taxes. So they ended up moving to Pennsylvania, rural Pennsylvania, and sort of started over in Pennsylvania. And because we’d promised to take care of it and restore it and turn it back into what it once was, they held to the commitment of our offer and passed on all of the cash offers.

KM: That is awesome. Can I ask you, did you write them a letter and kind of wax poetic about your love for the house and everything, did you write that letter?

ML: We didn’t- We’ve communicated to them since then. We had them over after we did the work to the house. We did communicate all of that through our realtor, so our realtor explained that to them, they understood it very well. I think maybe we did the day we walked through, I think we did talk to them and I think we did have that conversation with them.

KM: Well, that makes all the difference, I think. people love their houses and they don’t want to think about them getting torn down.

ML: Yeah, and it was very emotional for them to leave, you can tell that this was painful for them. And so that was a big piece of it that we were going to restore it and, you know, take care of it. And that’s exactly what we did. We didn’t have a lot of money because we put all of our savings into buying the house. So we put a lot of elbow grease into fixing it, and that was the next step. We bought it, purchased it, we moved into it, it was not livable. It was not habitable. No one should have been living in that house. It was full of grease and mold and leaks and it needed- all the hardwood floors were there with all inlay, you know, it was all hard. The bedrooms were fir, and the living room was oak with a walnut inlay, but you couldn’t see any of that. You didn’t know any of that when you were walking because it was all covered up. And so when we finally got the house and it was empty and clean- or clean, it was empty and swept, we discovered even more. So we had the floors refinished, we painted everything, sort of fixed the walls that needed to be fixed, painted everything, fixed some of the water damage that was there, and made it a cute little house and restored everything basically to what it was, what was there, cause we didn’t have any money to improve anything, we just fixed it. and lived in it from 97 til our first son was born in 2001 just like that, with the original kitchen. The refrigerator did not- cause a modern refrigerator would not fit in the kitchen, there was like a little tiny refrigerator. And so we put the refrigerator in the basement. There was a door from the kitchen directly to the basement, so we put the refrigerator at the bottom of the stairs. And so we lived like that for, I don’t know, what is that like three, four years.

KM: You have to be young to live like that, Mark.

ML: Exactly right. And so we lived and we built a little office in the basement and just basically put up a wall and painted the walls of the basement. And that’s where we started our architecture firm, out of that basement, and lived in it like that for a long time. And then our son was born. And the windows were original too. The windows had no insulation, they were single pane, rattled. They were so old, all the weatherstripping was gone. And we used to put our son to bed in a snowsuit because it was so cold in the winter because there was no insulation, and we just didn’t have any money so that was what we had to do. And that was fine for us, we were fine.

KM: Yeah he survived, right? 

ML: Yeah, he survived and we did fine. Although, Ann Marie’s parents were not too happy with that. They were a significant part of our story. Ann Marie and I were both full time practicing architects. We were partners in our firm and we both worked full time, and Ann Marie’s mom was the one that helped us raise our kids, so they were always close to us. And now we’re actually in North Carolina because they also moved, they moved away from us and we followed them down to North Carolina. But that was how we did it, we had them. But once they realized how we were living, they were like, okay, they’re going to live that way, whatever. But one day they were there and we were giving James a bath- and the hot water heater was original too. So you couldn’t fill up the bathtub with hot water. It just wouldn’t fill up, it would get cold too quickly. So we were carrying pots of boiling water from the kitchen through the house to the bath tub for washing the baby. And we were doing that every day, it was just part of how we lived our life there.

KM: Right, just what you did. You didn’t realize how good you could have had it if you had a full size hot water heater.

ML: The original boiler was there, so we were using the original 1934. Actually, it probably was converted in the forties, it was originally coal and it was converted to oil, because there was a coal chute. And out of necessity, we just lived that way. And so my father-in-law saw that and said no more, I don’t care what you need to do, you’re going to put an addition on this house and fix the boiler and fix the kitchen and start living like human beings, because it was still not habitable the way we were living. I mean, it was cold and it was drafty and it looked beautiful, we got it restored back to what it was, but it wasn’t realistic to live like that. He helped us get a loan, he helped us with a little bit of the funding to do it, and we put on a new kitchen addition and a dining room addition, put in all new windows, and a full new HVAC system. So basically fixed the house. We did as little as possible, but did what needed to be done. We basically built the space for the kitchen and then put an Ikea temporary kitchen in that lasted another 10 years. We had a wonderful life in that house, so many memories. The dining room became our family room, this big table that was Ann Marie’s grandmother’s table. And it just was perfect for us. And we raised three kids in that house, until 2019, we moved from New York after 21 years of being in the house, we moved to North Carolina. Throughout that process, we did finally finish the kitchen probably about three years before we moved. So we got to enjoy the beautiful kitchen. And when we sold the house, the house was finished and it had wood paneling on the walls of the dining room that I built myself and the kitchen was finished. And when we did- Oh, that’s, that’s a big part of the story, when we did the kitchen and the dining room, we also put a second floor on it, so basically raised the roof a little bit. And the second floor became one big open space and a second bathroom. And so we used the second floor as a master bathroom. No shower because the septic system was also original, so we technically couldn’t have a shower up there. So we had a sink and a toilet and a big open space that became Ann Marie’s studio and our bedroom. And then we had two bedrooms downstairs. We had one room that ended up being our daughter’s room and one room that the boys shared and lived like that happily ever after for 21 years. And then moved on in 2019 to Charlotte. Sold to another young couple who was about to have a baby just before we sold it to them. And so they are starting the next chapter of this little house, fourth owner. So now they’re, they’re raising their little baby over there.

KM: Aw, that’s nice. So nobody tried to buy it from you to tear down when you sold it.

ML: No, that was actually very important to us as well, because not only did we promise the people we bought it from that we wouldn’t tear it down, but we put our heart and soul into it too. And we really felt right from the beginning that we were stewards of the house, that this was something that was a responsibility to restore this so it would not be torn down. And so by the time we sold it, I mean, you could have torn it down and you probably would have made some money, but we built it to the point where it could be everything, it could be as what it was. And we put a big kitchen on it, big living room, big dining room, gave it everything it could be. Certainly they could have torn it down, but we sold it for a pretty good profit for what we put into it, cause the market in 21 years skyrocketed, and sold it really well. And that helped us start this new chapter in North Carolina, where we’re doing that all over again, we’re renovating a house and totally transforming what we’ve built, what we bought down here.

KM: I don’t know if all architects are like this, but I feel strongly that I’m the steward of the houses that I live in and I’m just trying to make them happy again, and then we end up moving on. I mean, this is only our second house, but after about 12 or 13 years, it’s time to move on to the next house in need. We’re coming up on that next year. Probably when my daughter gets out of high school, we’ll probably find somewhere else, but it’s a fun hobby to have. And living among the- a lot of architect friends I have, and I wonder if you had countertops that were made out of plywood in your temporary kitchen for 10 years?

ML: We did not have plywood. We had Ikea prefab countertops that came with the cabinets. The cabinets were those cabinets that had the legs that you can buy from Ikea. And so we put two cabinets on either side of the window and installed the sink in the countertop, basically designed the kitchen that we originally built or finally built, so all the plumbing and the gas and everything was where it belonged. We used the original 1940 stove in the new kitchen. And the refrigerator was the same refrigerator. Actually we got rid of the old refrigerator, bought a new refrigerator. But you know, we didn’t have the money to finish the kitchen. We didn’t really have the money to do the addition.

KM: I hear you, I’ve been in the very same position, and you just live like that. And then later, like your story about bringing the hot water upstairs in pans, it’s like, you just don’t really think about it. But then when you have the technology to have hot water come out of the tap, it’s like, this is so great!

ML: Yeah. Looking back, you know, like what were you thinking? But at the time that’s just life. You do what you have to do.

KM: Yeah, exactly you do.

ML: Yeah, it’s fun. We are doing it all over again. We did a major renovation to this house and now we’re in a point where we need to sort of stop and refund, get our funds back in order and do the next step. The original kitchen that we bought the house with was probably done in the early 2000s, and we tore some of it apart to put new windows in. And so now we’re living in another house that’s not finished, you know, and once again you get used to it and you live this way and hopefully we’re gonna get to finish the kitchen in the next year or so.

KM: Yeah you do get used to it, that’s the good news. Well, do you have photos of this house?

ML: I do, I’ll send you photos. We actually have an entire, I’ll have to find it, we have an album for the house. And that shows the original house from the forties, pictures of it from the forties that the original owner sent to us or the people that we bought it from sent to us. And we have what it looked like when we bought it, and then we have the whole history of the cottage renovations. 

KM: Well I’d love to include that, if you don’t mind, I have these episode enhancements where I can put photos and things, so that would be fun. There’s nothing like a hoarder house or house that is completely down on its luck and you feel like you’re doing a good thing for the house, and you get to live in this cool house that maybe you couldn’t afford otherwise if it were fixed up. Also, kitchens that are worth tearing out, meaning you don’t have to feel guilty about that because perfectly good cabinets are hard to justify removing. So yeah, I’m all for buying a hoarder house.

ML: The old wooden pantry cabinet that the cupboard, that was in the original house we actually dismantled, and my father took it and reinstalled it in his house. He has a little cottage, my mom and dad have a little cottage on the Saint Lawrence river way upstate New York, right on the border of Canada, and they spend their summers up there. And now that cupboard is there in their kitchen.

KM: Oh, that’s nice. It lives on.

ML: It does, yeah. So little pieces of that house are still part of our family.

KM: You know, I feel like houses are part of the family.

ML: Yeah, very much so. We really feel that way. I mean, we’re not crazy. It’s not like they’re human, but they really do become a part of your story. They become part of who you are. And that house in Chappaqua really was a part of our family’s history. As grandparents, we will tell stories about that house and growing up there and the good and the bad. And some of those things that we struggled through add to that story and make life better.

KM: Yeah, that’s very true. Well, thanks for sharing that. 

ML: Yeah, you’re welcome. Thanks for giving me the opportunity, cause I never get a chance to talk about that stuff.

KM: Well, anytime. If you think of other houses you’ve renovated you forgot to mention today, you can always come back. 

ML: That’s the only one, except for this one. this one’s not an old one. This one was built in 93. 

KM: I’m kind of surprised after living in that house that you’d buy a house built in 93.

ML: We are surprised too, but then the same thing happened here. You know, there’s nothing here. The area of North Carolina that we are living in is all brand new. So it’s a developer house, thousands of developer houses all over around us. And so this development was built in the early nineties and this house again had its own story. This was a short sale. Somebody couldn’t afford to pay for it. And it was a typical 1990s, fake stucco, fake arch windows, you know, square windows but fake arches over them, it was everything that it makes my stomach heart hurt, even thinking about what it was. And we just, we completely renovated it and transformed it. We took it from that nineties, which was really popular in the nineties, but it was extremely dated now, and turned it into a little, you know, we put white clapboard siding on it, put all new windows in it, reconfigured the porch, fixed the porch, put in a brick foundation. We veneered the foundation with brick and made it look like- what we tried to make it look like is that the house sort of has a main centerpiece, the massing has a main centerpiece. And then there’s a couple of little wings off to the side. So we wanted it to look like maybe it was built as a little bungalow and then it was added to. It wasn’t that, it was all built at one time, but that was the story that we wrote for the house. It was this little 1920s bungalow, and then it had these additions. And so that’s sort of the, the idea is that if you had a 1920s bungalow and it was renovated for today, what would it look like? And so that’s what we turned it into. So we’re happy with what, where it’s going. And it’s not anywhere near there yet, it needs a lot of landscape work and… we’ll get there.

KM: I have a picture of that now in my mind, Mark. So I might need to see a photo of that.

ML: I’ll send you a before and after of that as well. 

KM: Yeah. I mean, cause where I am is not a neighborhood, I mean, it was built over hundreds of years, so it doesn’t have that kind of organization of a neighborhood that’s all built at the same time, so I’m kind of intrigued by that in a way. Also intrigued by the idea of living in North Carolina, where it’s probably a lot nicer out. Lot greener outside where you are.

ML: It is, the trees are all budding. All the blossoms are blossomed, and the trees are budding, the birds are singing.

KM: That’s a couple of months away for us up here. So that’s getting old, as I contemplate our move coming up.

ML: Carolina’s very nice Katherine, you should come and visit.

KM: Maybe, maybe we’ll go down South.

ML: Spring starts sometime in late February. 

KM: What, really?

ML: Yeah, it starts getting warm in late February and Spring’s here in mid March.

KM: Well as you know, that’s not the case up here.

ML: No. No, I don’t miss the snow at all.

KM: It’s not so much the snow as like the frozen mud that I don’t love through March. But anyway, you are a pretty busy guy otherwise, besides renovating your houses. Do you want to say anything about the empire you’ve built?

ML: Yeah, sure. Well, you’re part of that empire. I have two things going on, I have three things going on actually. My wife and I still are practicing architects. We have a very small firm down here, our plan is to do new homes. So we actually purchased property several years ago with the idea that it was either an investment or we would develop it. It was before we decided to move down here, but our plan is to develop it. And so our plan is to use our architecture skills and our license to design and build new homes, one at a time, have some fun with those. And then in 2012, I launched Entre Architect, which is a platform for small firm architects to learn better business. So if there’s any architects out there, you should come visit us at entrearchitect.com. And in January of 2020, Dimitrius Lynch and I became partners and launched Gabl Media, which is a multimedia network for the architecture, engineering, and construction industries. And we do podcasts and video channels and someday we’ll probably publish books and that’s sort of the planning for that. And you’re a big part of that, so you’re a co-host on one of the shows called Context and Clarity, and I love that. I love that you’re a part of it. And I’m excited about where both of those businesses are going into the future.

KM: That is really exciting. I mean, it’s nice to have different things going on. At least for me, I find it feeds my creativity to have different types of projects happening. So that keeps me happy.

ML: Yeah, very much so. And really, my fuel is helping other people. It just makes me happy. And so the internet has enabled me to do that with thousands of people.

KM: Thousands, yeah. You have 7,000 people in the Entre Architect community.

ML: And the Facebook group, yeah. It’s very gratifying and I really have come to the point in my life that I feel that it is my purpose, that everything that we’re growing and Entre Architect, and now at Gabl Media, that it’s just the path that I’m supposed to be on. And so I just keep moving forward and just keep trying to continue to grow it and try to have an impact on as many people’s lives as I possibly can.

KM: Well, it’s been a great community to be a part of during this time of everybody being in their own spaces. Connecting through people on that has been invaluable, so I really appreciate that you have that.

ML: Yeah, thank you. Well, I mean the Facebook group and a lot of the other things that we’re doing, I started them, but they are only as great as they are from the people who are participating in them. And so it is a great community, and the people who are in there helping one another, the very positive culture, very supportive culture. And it’s a great place to be, at the Facebook group and over at the membership and all the other things we do.

KM: Unfortunately, you can only be there if you’re an architect though, right?

ML: Yes, the facebook group is a private group only for architects, yes. But there is another group, if you’re part of the architecture world, if you’re an ally of architects, we have another group called Architects and Allies that is a similar structure, but it’s open to anybody who’s- it is private and you have to Request membership, but it’s for architects and allied professions. So media and manufacturers and engineers and consultants. That’s where we have conversations with the rest of the profession, over there at Architects and Allies.

KM: I feel like I’ve seen interior designers around somewhere.

ML: They’re welcome there, they’re welcome to be allies. Only architects and architecture students are allowed to join Entre Architect in the facebook group. 

KM: Well you have some perks as an architect. We don’t have a lot, so that’s one of them.

ML: Yeah. And the intent of that group is to have a private, safe, secure place where we can have those conversations that we can’t have anywhere else. So we can talk to just us. And so there’s no clients in there, there’s no consultants in there, there’s no manufacturers trying to sell you anything. It’s just architects helping architects. So it’s really special.

KM: Now people are going to wonder what we talk about when nobody else is listening, but you’ll never know.

ML: Exactly, you’ll never know

KM: Unless you become an architect. Well thank you for everything you do Mark, and thank you for coming on today. 

ML: You’re very welcome. Thank you for being a part of what I’m doing and thank you for letting me be part of what you’re doing.