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Jeff Frey
Redoing the Redstone
After years of dirt accumulation, the Redstone was cleaned with hot water spray and detergent. The gingerbread on the porch and special trim paint scheme were added during renovation.
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Jeff Frey
Redoing the Redstone
Between five and eight coats of white paint were removed to restore the beamed ceilings, quartersawed oak wainscoting and oak stairways of the Redstone. This reception area once served as the main entrance for the Redstone town house.
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Jeff Frey
Redoing the Redstone
Entrepreneur Howard Klatzky, president of H.T. Klatzky & Associates, is responsible for the renovation of the Redstone. His office contains many period pieces, including a silk lampshade and a Duluth advertising tin collection.
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Redoing the Redstone
This 1892 photo shows Duluth's Redstone building just after it was constructed, with newly planted trees on the boulevard. The porch railings are no longer present, and only one entrance stairway remains.
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Redoing the Redstone
An 1889 advertisement for architect Oliver G. Traphagen.
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Jeff Frey
Redoing the Redstone
Curved glass windows and cherry woodwork highlight the west parlor of the Redstone, now used as a conference room. The wallpaper, entitled "Walla Walla Stripe," was reproduced by the Richard E. Thibaut Company. It dates from the late Victorian era of 1880 to 1900. The chairs, circa 1900, were made at the Webster Chair Company of Superior, Wisconsin. The fireplace is one of ten in the building.
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Jeff Frey
Redoing the Redstone
The Redstone's unique architecture is emphasized by the window treatment in a third floor room, now used as an office.
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Jeff Frey
Redoing the Redstone
The marble-topped sink is the only plumbing fixture original to the Redstone that is still in existence today. The fancy brass legs came from a sink that was scrapped from the Duluth Board of Trade Building, also designed by Traphagen. Two original antique high-top oak toilets were installed during the renovation. The antique mirror is from an old barber shop.
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Jeff Frey
Redoing the Redstone
The east parlor of the Redstone is now used as a reception area and informal conference area. Shown are account executive Steve Greenfield and vice president and creative director Marsha Hystead.
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Jeff Frey
Redoing the Redstone
The newel post in the reception area of the Redstone now sports this special, antique touch.
Prime Office Space Was Just a Renovation Away
When Howard Klatzky first saw it, he knew.
"I first looked at the place in August of 1986," says Klatzky, the bearded Duluth, Minnesota, ad agency executive whose clients are in tourism, finance, health care and utilities among others. His friend, Dan King of Overman Company Realtors, was showing Klatzky properties in Duluth's east end on a rainy afternoon when he suggested taking a peek inside a big old brownstone mansion.
"I took one step inside the place and said 'This is it,"' says Klatzky. "It" was the Redstone, one of Oliver G. Traphagen's architectural masterpieces which has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Once one of the most prestigious addresses in the Twin Ports, the Redstone, like many elegant older buildings in Duluth and other Great Lakes Rustbelt cities, had seen better days. Built in 1892 by the Duluth architectural firm of Traphagen and Fitzpatrick, the Romanesque Revival Redstone was constructed of what was then technically known as "brownstone" from quarries located on the Iron River in Wisconsin about 30 miles to the east of the Twin Ports. It was that same summer in the late 19th century that the first train load of iron ore came down to the Duluth harbor from the Merritt family's Mountain Iron mine on the as-yet untested Mesabi Iron Range. And that same year Traphagen's downtown crown jewel, the Torrey Building, was built from Michigan Portage Entry sandstone.
Traphagen lived in the Redstone for five years. During that period, Traphagen designed some 50 Duluth homes, not to mention a number of architecturally significant businesses and commercial properties. The Board of Trade Building, Munger and Chester Terraces, the former City Hall, Fitger's Brewery and the First Presbyterian Church all bear the stamp of Traphagen's romantic style.
The Redstone might have continued in the possession of the Traphagen family for decades had it not been for family illness. Still only 43 years old, Traphagen moved his family to Hawaii in search of a more benign climate for his stricken daughter. While in Honolulu, he continued his trade, designing Waikiki' s first hotel, the Moana, the Hawaiian Hotel and the imposing James B. Castle residence on Waikiki beach. In 1906, Traphagen moved again, this time to the San Francisco Bay area. But by the time he reached California in 1907, the architect's creative juices had dried up. Although he lived another quarter century, Traphagen never designed another building, dying in Alameda, California, in 1932.
Traphagen's Duluth residential legacy continued in genteel circumstances. When the architect and his family left for Hawaii in 1897, he sold the house to Duluth mining and timber magnate Chester Congdon. Arguably the most famous of Duluth's fin de siecle patrician families, the Congdons lived in the house while Chester was building his Glensheen Mansion, about 20 blocks east. In 1908, the Congdons moved into Glensheen on the shores of Lake Superior.
In 1919, following Chester Congdon's death, the family estate spent more than $20,000 refurbishing the Redstone from its double town house configuration into a series of nine small rental units. The house remained in the Congdon family until1935 when it began a round of property transfers that saw it pass through a dozen or more hands during a 40-year period. In 1972, Duluth real estate entrepreneur Ben Overman added the house to his stable of Twin Ports rental properties.
Enter Howard Klatzky and witness a return to baronial prominence.
What Klatzky has done to the Redstone can best be described as a labor of love. Literally everything in the building – all of the light fixtures, portmanteaus, lamps, chairs, chintzes – are antiques. In a bathroom off the first floor conference room is a high-top toilet with a chain pull. Dating from the turn of the century, the toilet isn't a reproduction. "I found it in a garage in the Lakeside neighborhood," Klatzky deadpans. An antique collector from an early age, Klatzky used authentic period furniture and materials whenever possible.
Besides exercising his passion for antiques in furnishing the Redstone, Klatzky located the best help he could find for remodeling the building. Key to the success of the project was the contribution of Pat Anderson, a Glass Block department store interior decorator with a special interest in Victorian homes. "We spent all last winter working on this," Klatzky says of his collaboration with Anderson. "We must have looked through every wallpaper book in the city."
Also singled out for praise is the work of the husband-and-wife team of Pat Longville and Ray Luoma. The couple did all of the wood stripping in the interior/ a job that required removing nearly 70 years of paint layers. "They just did an incredible job," Klatzky says. "As did Bernie Lee and the crew of General Painting and Decorating, Dave Nelson of Old House Restoration Company and Mike and Cynthia Bradley of the Floor to Ceiling Store in Duluth."
On Labor Day weekend of 1986, a crew of Klatzky's employees descended on the Redstone to plan where offices would be located. 'We all made notes and designed the floor plans with a Macintosh computer,' Klatzky says. ''We tried to do it with a minimum amount of wall removal. We were lucky in that we found the 1919 blueprints on microfilm in the City of Duluth Building Permit office." One major task that had to be completed early on was a complete rewiring of the house's electrical system.
Klatzky, a native Duluthian, started his retail advertising agency in 1975. The first Klatzky agency office was temporarily located in a basement. Four years later, Klatzky bought out his partner's interest and went searching for an older house to call home.
The house he found was far from in mint condition. "It was in lousy shape," Klatzky remembers. "We had to plaster, paint, rewire and put on a new roof. It was rented out to college students but never subdivided into apartments. When I first looked at it there was a tent in the living room."
That first restored house gave the agency close to 4,000 square feet of work area. It was comfortable, and although the house did not have the same historical importance as the Redstone, it did have an identity to it. "We just outgrew it," Klatzky says, noting that moving into the Redstone effectively doubled the space available to the agency.
For Klatzky, refurbishing an old house into an office isn't altogether altruistic. He readily admits that there are advantages for the agency to be located in the Redstone. ''We own the property,'' he says, "and we can better control our own destiny. Tax benefits are a small part of it, and we end up with usable space with more character for less cost.'' Klatzky adds that the agency and its 17 employees do not have to be located right downtown, since their clients are from Duluth and across the state.
Klatzky has seen similar renovations done in Minneapolis-St. Paul and Chicago. "I saw it done here, to a lesser extent, with the Thomas and Vecchi offices across the street from the Redstone," he says. A final advantage, he explains, is that advertising agencies are in the business of promotion, and a tastefully done refurbishing of an older house as an office has promotional benefits. The Klatzky agency is already using a pen-and-ink drawing of the Redstone in its letterhead. The house was displayed to the public in November, with proceeds from the tours going to the Duluth Public Arts Commission.
After 15 months of owning the Redstone, and all of the initial outlay for restoration and renovation, Klatzky is convinced that he did the right thing. "First off,'' he says, ''we are saving such a fine old building. The stairway was sagging, the wiring was ready to start frying, the ceiling was coming down and the porch was leaking badly. There are major things we haven't yet done, including rebuilding the front porch, replacing storm windows and putting on a new roof. Still, it cost us less to own this building than to lease comparable space in an average office building."
One gets the impression that Oliver G. Traphagen would approve of the recent transformation of the Redstone. Klatzky admits that even he did not envision how well the restoration would all fit together, but he is adamant about the preservation of the historical integrity of the Redstone.
"As practically as possible, we've preserved the spirit of the building Thaphagen created. The tendency today is to gut an old building and start all over,'' Klatzky states. "That's not what I think a building of this caliber is deserving of. And we didn't do that."
Bill Beck is a historian, who authored Northern Lights, a history of Minnesota Power.