The story of the Rose Cottage started all the way back in 1894, when the prolific builder team Marcuse & Remmel put up four houses in a row here on Mozart Street. One of them, 1528 Mozart, was profiled last year in the Alameda Post. And over the course of these four installments, we’ve been profiling its neighbor, 1530 Mozart, which has been lovingly and meticulously restored by homeowner Tommie Veirs. For the past 50 years, Tommie (Thomasina) has made the restoration of this Queen Anne gem her life’s work, restoring both the interior and exterior to the highest levels of Victorian-era style.
Along the way she had lots of help from a talented team of carpenters, painters, plasterers, and artisans of all kinds. Just as Tommie has developed a long-term relationship with her 132-year-old house, she’s also developed long-term relationships with the team of tradespeople who have restored her home to the condition it’s in today.
Help from Felix Marcuse
When restoring the façade of 1530 Mozart, some of the decorative elements were so damaged, deteriorated, or even missing, that they had to be re-created from scratch. Striving to be historically accurate, Tommie did what many restorers do—she sought out a comparable Marcuse & Remmel house in the neighborhood as a model for some elements of her restoration. But Tommie didn’t pick just any M&R house; she went straight to the source and sought out Felix Marcuse’s own house, at 1556 Verdi Street, just one street over from hers. Marcuse had this unique home built for himself by his own company in 1893, and it has a very special double-roofed corner tower that I’ve not seen anywhere else in town. The fact that Tommie’s house has a matching triangle gable design to Marcuse’s own house is a sign of her dedication to authenticity of design.
A discovery
When Tommie and her husband Tom first bought their house in 1976, they thought about how convenient it would be to have a pass-through window from the kitchen to the dining room, but other projects took precedence and they never got around to it. It wasn’t until 2021, when Tommie was cleaning out a kitchen closet that had once been the water heater closet, that she discovered that her home actually did once have a pass-through window. At the back of the closet she found a window frame, along with cutouts for ropes and pulley weights. It was then that she realized that this closet once contained the original kitchen-to-dining room pass-through window, which had been replaced by a water heater at some point. With the water heater long gone, Tommie had been using it as a storage closet for crafts and restoration supplies.
Never say no
“I decided I wanted to put the pass-through back,” Tommie noted. “On November 14, 2021, I had an appointment with Tom Wolter, lead carpenter for the 2014 restoration of my home’s exterior. Tom was the one person who would never say no to my crazy ideas. He would find a way.”
The first issue Tom encountered was knob-and-tube wiring in the way of the spot where the pass-through window needed to be. That wiring had to be re-routed.
An unexpected gift
Over the course of eight months, the former closet was turned into a framed box, complete with an interior platform, a restored window, and even matching Marcuse & Remmel pressed-wood casing. Tommie described how that “impossible to find” original casing was found. “The door casing really needed to match the rest of the woodwork in the dining room—a pressed grape leaf pattern which Marcuse & Remmel used for several years and was impossible to find today. Many years back I had mentioned my pass-through fantasy to Virgil and Margie Silver, who had the same woodwork in their house. A short time later, the Silvers showed up with three pieces of casing with the grape leaf pattern, tied together with a big bow.”
Ben Franklin and Michelangelo
After the pass-through project was finally done, Tommie felt it still needed a finishing touch. Since the whole idea of the pass-through was to save time, Tommie decided to feature appropriate quotes from Ben Franklin and Michelangelo, with the lettering created by Fast Signs and applied to the glass using gold decals. The quote from Ben Franklin reads, “Time – Waste not want not” and the quote from Michelangelo Buonarroti is, “There is no greater harm than that of time wasted.” Looking around Tommie’s circa 1894 Victorian-era home, one can see evidence everywhere of time not wasted.
One thing leads to another
As with many home improvement projects, once you do one thing, it leads to the next. With her nice new pass-through window installed, Tommie looked around the dining room and decided that the ceiling and walls needed restoration too. The wallpaper on the ceiling was splitting and peeling, and the lath and plaster walls had cracks and other damage.
“I contacted Myron Olson of Olson’s Painting,” Tommie said. “His workers had done a fabulous job painting the house’s exterior and I respected and trusted his work. We came up with a start date of December 20, 2021.”
An old medallion unearthed
When Tommie and Tom first bought the house back in 1976, there was no ceiling medallion in the dining room. Then, when the house was going to be photographed for the book Victorian Splendor, they put up a piece of Bradbury wallpaper as a temporary medallion. At around that time (1981), a five-part ceiling medallion was purchased from Victoriana, but that medallion remained in the basement until November 2021, when it was finally brought upstairs for installation. After 40 years in the basement, the medallion needed a month of cleaning, sanding, vacuuming, and priming before Tommie could begin painting it. In March 2022, Myron Olson’s team began installing the now-vintage medallion that had been purchased from Victoriana more than 40 years earlier, in its rightful place in the center of the newly painted dining room.
The unending restoration
As each project finished, Tommie set her sights on the next one. It seems that restoring and preserving a Victorian-era house is not something that’s ever fully done—it’s more of a lifetime commitment. Part of restoring the ceiling in the dining room involved taking down the antique gaslight-style light fixture, so Tommie called her friend, local preservationist Bob Farrar, to ask if he knew someone who could take down the fixture for her. Bob showed up the next day, and not only did he take down the fixture, but he also offered to rewire it so it would be safe for the next hundred years. Tommie lists this as an example of how kind people can be, and how much support she’s received for her project of restoring her classic Marcuse & Remmel home…