|
|
Welcome to our news section. Visit this page often as we will be updating the information with all of our latest happenings, awards and events.
2007 WRA Residential Interior Gold award winner
2007 WRA Residential Kitchen Gold award Winner
2007 WRA Website Gold award winner
2007 Milwaukee Home and Fine Living Design Awards
Best Kitchen: Gold Award
2007 Milwaukee Home and Fine Living Design Awards
Best Kitchen: Bronze Award
MBA Fall Remodelors Tour
 This home features a family room addition with mudroom entry. The Kitchen was completely remodeled with custom cabinets, granite tops, tumbled marble back splash, and oak wood floors.
Off the kitchen is the planning desk area, which is adjacent to the reconfigured powder room. The second floor consists of a new master bathroom, remodeled closet area and a custom wardrobe cabinet in an adjacent bedroom.
2007 MBA Fall Remodelors Tour
People's Choice Award
|
2006 AWARDS
NARI 2006 Gold Award for Residential Kitchen $60,000 - $100,000
NARI 2006 Gold Award for Residential Kitchen Over $100,000
NARI 2006 Silver Award for Residential Bath $30,000 - $60,000
NARI 2006 Silver Award for Residential Bath Over $60,000
NARI 2006 Silver Award for Residential Interior Under $50,000
NARI 2006 Silver Award for Residential Interior Specialty
Stable Environment
Cream City Construction, Quorum Architects strut their stuff
in quarters that once housed beer family horses
By WHITNEY GOULD
wgould@journalsentinel.com
Posted to JSOnline.com : April 9, 2007
 In Milwaukee's Gilded Age, even the horse barns of our beer barons were lovingly crafted.
With its keystone arches, well-proportioned dormers and classical pediment, the tawny brick stable behind Frederick Pabst Jr.'s columned mansion at 3112 W. Highland Blvd. was no exception. The ceilings were of quarter-sawn oak, the floors of stamped concrete made to look like cobbles.
Today the beautifully refurbished 1897 stable houses Cream City Construction, a five-member firm that specializes in giving new life to older buildings. And the Classical Revival house built the same year by Pabst, the son of the Pabst Brewing Co. founder of the same name, is home to Quorum Architects, whose motto is "We Recycle Buildings."
Talk about a perfect showcase for your work. And in the perfect setting: the Concordia neighborhood, where history buffs for years have been rejuvenating the long-neglected mansions of 19th century Milwaukee's movers and shakers.
"Re-use is the most sustainable form of architecture," says Allyson Nemec, 41, a principal with the 12-person Quorum firm, which often collaborates on building projects with Cream City, in which Nemec's 42-year-old husband, Todd Badovski, is a partner and architectural designer. The pair own the Highland Blvd. properties jointly with Bill Hicks, Badovski's co-principal at Cream City.
When the trio bought the properties five years ago, the stable that had once sheltered Fred Pabst's 12 horses - and later, horses for the Milwaukee Police Department - most recently had been a dog kennel for the family that lived in the Pabst house.
"It was a mess," Badovski recalls. "Years of grime on the ceiling. It took six cleanings to get it all off. There was so much gunk that a floor drain clogged up." (One surprise: Hicks found an old beer bottle from the rival Miller Brewing Co. hidden in the ceiling.)
Cream City updated the mechanical systems, sandblasted the brick walls and installed knotty cedar partitions resembling horse stalls to mark off work spaces. They refinished one of the original doors, topped it with glass and turned it into a conference table.
The glass door from a case for Pabst's horse-show trophies was set into a wall in Hicks' office; horse bollards, with their ball tops, flank interior doors framed by recycled wood; an old boot washer, a fireplace-shaped porcelain basin where stable hands cleaned the manure off their boots, became a bathroom magazine rack.
The original ceiling-hung radiators are gone, but their hooks still dangle next to new ductwork that has been left exposed - a metaphor for the marriage of old and new that is Cream City's specialty. The stable conversion in 2004 won a Cream of the Cream City preservation award from the mayor's office.
Upstairs are two apartments carved out of what had been the living quarters for the Pabst family's stable hands and housemaids.
When Pabst, then second vice president of the Pabst Brewing Co., built his home and stable 110 years ago - the family lived there until 1908 - they were on the western edge of the city, along a boulevard lined with palatial homes of the brewery elite. Among them were Pabst's older brother, Gustave, and his family; Lisette Miller, widow of Miller Brewery Co.'s Fred Miller; and the Gettleman family.
"It was kind of a little brewers' club, that street," says John Eastberg, senior historian at the more famous Capt. Frederick Pabst Mansion, the Flemish Renaissance Revival home that Fred's father and boss built in 1890 at 2000 W. Wisconsin Ave.
Designed by his old school chum Max Fernekes, Pabst Jr.'s home was not as grand as his father's showplace. But it had its own charms: ornately carved woodwork, pocket doors, herringbone parquet floors, gilded ceiling moldings, luminous stained-glass windows, ornamental metalwork by the Austrian-born master Cyril Colnik.
The Colnik touches are gone, but many of the other flourishes have survived the home's conversion over the years to offices for various owners, including the YWCA and the Wisconsin Society of Professional Engineers. Still tucked into risers in the servants' staircase are little drawers for gloves.
Nemec, whose firm eventually plans to redo the inappropriately modern kitchen and bathrooms, says that part of the joy of working in the house is its family atmosphere. "Everyone has access to natural light," she says, "and in the summer we have meetings on the veranda."
The other pleasure is having a workplace that shows off the firm's commitment to reclaiming history. "It's sort of a brand for what we do - giving new life to old urban spaces," Nemec says. "From working here, we get internal knowledge of what it takes to own and maintain an old building, and we can pass that on to our clients."
Nemec and Badovski, who have boys ages 6 and 9, liked the neighborhood so much that they moved into it. Their home, within walking distance of work, is a former Marquette University dental-fraternity house on W. State St., which the couple spent three years restoring. The 1907 house was a bit of a wreck, complete with a door handle in the shape of a tooth.
"For a long time, people routinely tore down these old places," Nemec says, shaking her head. "It's appalling how much was lost. Thankfully, that seems to have ebbed."
For a slide show of old and new views of the Frederick Pabst Jr. home and stable, click on www.jsonline.com/links.
|
