1820 Monument Avenue: A mansion and a history lesson, in 6664 square feet – Richmond.com

For many years, patients walked into the large, Colonial Revival-style house at 1820 Monument Avenue and sat down in what had once been the front parlor, waiting to be called back to the dermatologists office. Many of them probably noticed that the rooms on the first floor were beautifully detailed, with coffered ceilings, high wainscoting and intricate dentiled molding.

For a doctors office, the architectural features might have been unusual. Its not unexpected in a house built for a successful businessman at the turn of the 20th century, though.

Garrett B. Wall, the original owner of 1820 Monument Avenue, was an executive with the C & O Railway, and when the house was built in 1906, it stood among a growing inventory of outstanding properties on a street which, in time, replaced West Franklin Street as Richmonds grandest avenue.

So how did the 6,664-square-foot Wall house, which is on the market as a single-family residence for $1,695,000, go from an executives private residence to a doctors office and back to a private residence again?

The answer charts the history of the Monument Avenue Historic District itself.

Planning for Monument Avenue began in the late 1880s, but the Panic of 1893 slowed down residential construction nationwide. Work on Monument Avenues first houses began in 1901, when public utilities were extended to the street, said Chris Novelli, an architectural historian with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.

Most of those early houses were built in the Queen Anne and Richardsonian Romanesque styles, both of which were popular in the late 19th century. The streets first example of the Colonial Revival style was built in 1905 at 1831 Monument Avenue, one year before the Wall house. By then, the Colonial Revival style had been established nationally, and it would become the most popular style for residential building in the United States during the first half of the 20th century.

The Wall house, with its classical columns, red-brick faade and light-colored interior, was a fairly pure, early example of the style for Monument Avenue, Novelli said.

He added: It has the aesthetic richness the Victorians and Edwardians were fond of, but expressed in a new, classical architectural language.

The architects sophisticated use of bowed walls in the entry hall and back parlor references the oval shapes popular in the Adam-style houses built in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, for example. They give a dynamic elasticity to the space, Novelli said.

Likewise, the houses dentiled molding and wainscoting are striking. The amount of dentiled molding in particular and the wainscoting height in the dining room is unmatched on Monument Avenue, said Jeannette Mock, a real estate agent with RE/MAX Commonwealth and the listing agent for 1820 Monument Avenue. Even the coffered ceilings have dentiled molding. Its the crowning glory of the house.

From 1901 to roughly 1930, some of the citys most successful residents built homes in the Monument Avenue Historic District, which runs from North Lombardy Street to Roseneath Road. But the street began a slow transformation as the rise of midcentury suburbia drew city residents further west. In the wake of that westward expansion, a number of houses in the historic district were converted to apartments and medical offices.

A part of the reason for the conversions was economic. These were large, old houses, and no one in the 1950s and 1960s considered them particularly historic, said Joseph F. Yates, president of Richmond-based Joseph F. Yates Architects and a Monument Avenue resident. So the families sold them, and people converted them for income-producing sources.

The large number of doctors offices among the conversions had a practical component, as well. Having two major hospitals Stuart Circle Hospital and the Lee Medical Building as nearby anchors probably encouraged a strong medical presence on the avenue, Novelli said.

The Wall house was a part of this conversion process. By the early 1970s, it had become a dermatologists office, Mock said.

By the 1990s, though, buyers began converting several properties on Monument Avenue from doctors offices and apartment buildings back to single-family homes. And that shift placed Monument Avenue among a handful of U.S. cities that saw prominent, urban housing inventory from the turn of the 20th century return to single-family use, Yates said.

There are still a good number of buildings that are apartments, but very few offices remain, said Yates, who converted his house from a doctors office to a single-family residence in 2000.

The conversions from apartments will continue as those buildings come on the market in the future, he added.

The Wall houses current owners undertook its conversion back to a private residence shortly after buying it in 2009. They removed walls that had been installed during the houses years as a medical office, and they designed and built a new kitchen and sunroom on the back of the house. In addition, they remodeled the houses four full baths and one half bath and installed new electrical, plumbing and HVAC systems.

They also finished a 1,100-square-foot section of the basement and built a detached, three-car garage behind the house, in what had been a parking lot for the medical office. The garages southern elevation does double duty as a patio wall, as well as the backdrop for an outdoor fireplace. (A stone slab with the initials G.B.W. presumably for Garrett B. Wall that the current owners found onsite, now rests at the base of the fireplace.)

Yates oversaw the design work, and Clark Glav, a Richmond-based preservation contractor and owner of ARK Construction & Development Corp., was in charge of the construction. On our biggest day, we had 32 people working on the house all at once, Glav said.

The owners used state historic tax credits for the renovation, and tax abatements are in place until 2020.

Despite its transformations over the course of a century, the house is still true to its original character, Mock said. Its an impressive space, but it feels warm and gracious.

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1820 Monument Avenue: A mansion and a history lesson, in 6664 square feet - Richmond.com