Bringing back the shine
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By Alma Gaul | Tuesday, March 25, 2008 |
Jeff Cook/QUAD-CITY TIMES Among the projects Stewart and Roxanne Garneau have accomplished since buying the Nathaniel French home overlooking Davenport’s East River Drive is to build an apartment on the third floor, creating two new dormer windows, which are visible on the left side of the roof. Buy this Photo
Interesting how life takes its turns.
In 1978, fresh out of training at Moline Lutheran Hospital, Roxanne DeGeeter worked as a private-duty nurse for a woman who lived in a grand mansion overlooking the Mississippi River in Davenport’s McClellan Heights neighborhood.
The mansion was built in 1912-1914 by Nathaniel French, a wealthy industrialist, and designed by Seth Temple, a leading Iowa architect.
Features included stone lions at the front door, a floor-to-ceiling stained-glass window at the staircase landing, five fireplaces, a third-floor ballroom, an elevator, a walk-in safe and extensive dark wood paneling, some of it imported from Europe.
The home was a showplace and expansive, too — about 5,000 square feet on each of the first two floors and more than 5,000 on the third.
Then the woman Roxanne cared for moved to California, and the home was purchased in 1980 by former U.S. Rep. Jim Leach and his wife, Deba, who made it their Iowa residence for about 20 years.
When the Leaches relocated to the Iowa City area in 2001 and put the home up for sale, who should step in to buy it but Stewart Garneau, an oncologist, and his wife, Roxanne, who were living at the time in the Watch Hill neighborhood of Rock Island.
“He said the house was crying for us,” Roxanne says of her husband.
The house was on the market for more than a year before the Garneaus bought it for $1.2 million, according to the Scott County Recorder’s office, and the couple has since put about that much into repairs and updating.
They closed on their purchase in February 2003, moved in during Memorial Day weekend that year and, now, five years later, are still chipping away at projects, although the bulk of the work is behind them.
“From the day we closed until Thanksgiving (2003), my parents (Ray and Em Foley) and I worked every day in this house,” Roxanne says.
While contractors handled heavy projects such as the installation of a geothermal heating and cooling system and repair of the red slate roof, Roxanne and her parents tackled the rooms one by one, tearing off old wallpaper, then painting and repapering with fresh colors and patterns.
The Leaches had turned the home over to the Quad-City Symphony for a show house fundraiser in 1981, with most of the rooms getting uniquely decorated by a team of about 20 interior designers.
“They thought it was fun to paper the ceilings,” Roxanne says. The designers also favored bold colors; the orange in the living room, for example, required five coats of white paint to cover.
“The thought of getting to start a new room kept you going,” she says of the nearly nine months they spent redoing rooms. And the extensive woodwork was beautiful, needing only Liquid Gold cleaner to bring out its luster, she adds.
The home’s floor plan is a large, river-facing rectangle. A hallway extends the length of the house with rooms on either side. The front and back doors are directly opposite each other in the middle of the rectangle.
First-floor rooms include two parlors, each with a fireplace; a dining room with walnut paneling and a built-in china hutch; and the kitchen.
There is also a laundry room; the safe (Roxanne remembers that the woman she worked for kept her silver there); a sunroom and a living room-library combination. The library portion contains built-in bookshelves faced with leaded glass and a large, extensively carved wood fireplace with a mirror.
The second floor has — or will when the work is done — six bathrooms as well as six bedrooms, two originally built for servants.
One of the Garneaus’ current projects is to reconfigure into a master bath a spare room on the second floor that sits atop the porch with windows on three sides.
Included in that area will be a laundry, steam shower and coffee bar. The Garneaus also expect to use the space with its up-and-down-the-river views as an exercise area and a place for his very early-morning reading.
In addition to the couple, the mansion is home to their 11-year-old son, four assorted dogs that came from the Humane Society and a furry cat.
The Garneaus frequently host visiting family members, including twin boy-girl grandchildren. Highchair seats, walkers and a playpen stay out for whenever they drop in. Family photos hang on the walls and stand on the fireplace mantels, and there are a variety of Isabel Bloom statues and collectible green frogs scattered about.
“This is our home, not a museum,” Roxanne says.
The third floor contains a ballroom with a curved ceiling, decorative plaster, deep wood paneling, a skylight and two pillars framing what was the band stage. Nowadays, the room contains a television, video games and weight-training equipment.
On either end are French doors opening to balconies. One recent day, Roxanne spotted a fish in one of the gutters, a meal dropped by an eagle. Ah, the joys of living on the river.
People touring the house for the first time often profess to being overwhelmed by the space. “But after living here, it just feels like home and you don’t feel the size anymore,” she says.
Alma Gaul can be contacted at (563) 383-2324 or agaul@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.
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