Lamartine Street is a single-family Victorian home built around 1900 in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston. Restoration began in 2004 and was a massive effort of not just restoring the home's exterior to its original glory, but the interior as well, which had been carved up into three seperate living spaces without regard to the history of the home.

The exterior of the home had not been painted in decades, and had severely degraded in many places. The front porch was literally sliding off the structure of the main house, and all of the fine ornamentation of the home had been removed to accomadate the red aluminum siding the previous owners placed on it.

Our team worked dilliengetly and with painstaking atttention to detail to not only repair what little ornamanetation existed, but to use it as a model for completely reconstructing new details by hand. Modeled after many of the restored homes in the surrounding area and colorfully painted in 7 different colors, the home returned to and surpassed its original glory.

At just over 2,500 square feet on three floors plus the basement, there was a substantial amount of work to be done on every face of the house. Interior restoration included reviving the three bedrooms on the third floor with vaulted ceilings.

Preserving as much as possible, the home quickly became the most stunning restoration on the mile-long street, and gracefully held her own with grandest of the other "painted ladies" of the neighborhood.

A significant amount of landscaping was also part of the project: removing dead and dying trees, clearing brush, and resurfacing walkways.

"Stepping into this house transports you back in time," testifies Christopher Graefe, the current owner of the home. "Given how badly it had been neglected and how poorly it had been remodeled in the past, it's a miracle that it could be returned to its original grandeur like this. Every detail of the restoration is impeccably done, inside and out."