Double Vision
After years of dreaming about owning an old home, twin brothers finally get the chance to restore an unusual Indiana farmhouse and fill it with period antiques and artwork.
Twin brothers spend a quarter century restoring a 19th-century Indiana Colonial and filling it with era-appropriate artwork, paint treatments and furniture.
Above: Brothers Fred and Ted bought their distinctive centerhall Colonial because it reminded them of classic styles they had seen in Connecticut. Originally set on more than 1,000 acres, the Indiana property was down to 55 acres when the brothers purchased it in the late 1980s.
Right: The keeping room’s floor was recycled from an old barn loft and painted with a diamond pattern. The blue chair rail and baseboard provide an extra pop of color and echo the blue in the 1840s-era cupboard. The small pistol on the table was found between the walls during restoration.
When twin brothers Fred and Ted first set eyes on the run-down 1870s Indiana farmhouse they now call home, their immediate thought was: “It’s haunted.” An address on Graveyard Road and a “Graves Realty” sign on the front lawn did nothing to dispel the notion. The property was vacant, the porch was missing, and the weathered gray house surrounded by tall weeds hadn’t been painted since it was built. The brothers didn’t even go inside. The house may not have been haunted, but its aura certainly stuck with Fred and Ted. Despite its dilapidated condition, the unusual center-entrance farmhouse spoke to them. “We kept thinking about it,” Fred says. “Eventually, we decided to go back and look inside.”
The pair had grown up in a four-room, post-World War II northern Indiana home built by their dad, but they traveled frequently to visit an aunt in Connecticut, where they remember being enchanted by the region’s historic architecture. “We always dreamed of living in an old house in the country, especially 18th-century ones like those we had seen in Connecticut,” Fred says. “When we were kids, we didn’t even have a fireplace to put our Christmas stockings on.”
Fred, a commercial artist, and Ted, an editor, were living in an Indianapolis apartment when they came across the farmhouse in the late 1980s. Once they saw the inside, however, they realized the 3,000-square-foot home “wasn’t too bad, at least structurally,” Fred remembers. “We thought it would take a few years to get it back into shape.”
In fact, the labor of love took about 25 years when all was said and done. Renovations included re-creating the two-story porch ( which was modeled after an original photograph supplied by a neighbor), repairing windows, replacing original plaster, rebuilding chimneys, and putting in three new Rumford fireplaces and a greenhouse. Fred and Ted replumbed and rewired, pulled up shag carpeting,
and repainted rooms—one even had red-white-and-blue carpet and glowing stars on the wall. “We’ve redone just about everything in the house,” Fred says, adding that, trained by their carpenter father, they did much of the work themselves. “We learned a lot from him, but a lot was also trial and error.”
Once the structural work was done, Fred and Ted’s fun began. Longtime fans of a now-defunct magazine called Colonial Homes, they studied the paint colors, furniture and antiques featured in the publication’s pages. They searched Midwestern antiques shows for 18th- and 19th-century antiques and art, especially portraits and landscapes. “Those periods offered the most beautiful furniture styles ever produced,” Fred explains. “The furniture was all handmade, giving it an individual quality that factory-made furniture cannot reproduce.” Fred even took things into his own hands in the west parlor, painting two period-style murals inspired by early prints of New York City and Richmond, Virginia.
Almost three decades after buying their “haunted” house, the brothers have few regrets. “We feel we have saved a beautiful piece of architectural history that otherwise would have been torn down and lost,” Fred says. “Restoring an old house is the most enjoyable thing we’ve done.”