At a time when older addresses are often overshadowed by gleaming new builds, one Sarasota home stands as an enduring relic. Located at 2525 Ashton Road, it’s nestled in a neighborhood with deep local roots: the Maine Colony Historic District, which came to be around 1916. Back then, snowbirds from the Pine Tree State built a group of bungalows to escape Maine’s cold winters. Many of the neighborhood’s early houses were kit homes shipped from the north, arriving in Tampa by train before being transported by boat to Sarasota.
Today, many of those original homes are still standing—some fixed up and charming, some replaced by slicker styles and some falling into disrepair. That’s how current owner Jeffrey Frank found 2525 Ashton, and a big reason why he liked it.
“I’ve always lived in historic homes and had an 1890s condo in Washington, D.C.,” says Frank. “When I looked at Sarasota’s Zillow, all I saw were golf course developments and cookie cutter houses. I needed soul, patina and grit. Then I saw this house, labeled a ‘handyman special.’ It was a wreck, and the photos showed just how much work it needed, but I was captivated. I’m not a handyman, but I married the right guy for that. Even the neighborhood was kind of rough at the time. Friends and family told us, ‘Absolutely not.’ So we went for it.”
Frank, a psychotherapist, and his husband Alexander Vasiljev, a former botanist at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, purchased the property in 2015 for $215,000. Set on more than an acre of land, it includes a 1,920-square-foot main house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, as well as a separate 400-square-foot one-bedroom, one-bathroom guest cottage. Frank and Vasiljev spent nearly a decade restoring the home, focusing on preservation rather than modernization.
That process involved leveling the wood frame home, stripping away drop ceilings to reveal an extra two feet of height, uncovering original heart pine floors beneath wall-to-wall carpet and replacing single-pane jalousie windows with double-pane modern glass while preserving the original wood frames…