Ten years ago, Julie Coletti toured a house as a courtesy. She drove by and decided it wasn’t her taste, but forgot to cancel a walk-through with a real estate agent.
“Queen Anne Victorian is not my favorite style,” she said. “Then I went inside and ended up buying it.”
Built in 1896 by Beltz and McKenzie for William J. White, a professor at Duff’s Mercantile College, in Pittsburgh, the three-story brick house anticipated the opening three years later of a cable-car line that would link this new middle- to upper-class streetcar suburb to the city’s center.
The house was broken into apartments after World War II but returned to grandeur in the 1980s when designer Sandy Tarr joined forces with an architect and construction company to renovate six houses in the neighborhood.
What isn’t original was replaced with period architectural antiques or painstakingly re-created. The ornate double front doors, for instance, came from Baltimore still pocked with bullet holes, and the stained-glass window in the staircase landing was a Philadelphia find.
Coletti has added her own touches. She bought the 1904 Steinway grand piano in the foyer to encourage herself to play and placed over the living room’s Fiori marble fireplace an acrylic painting by her late aunt and namesake, Giuliana De Matteis.
Her parents’ origins in L’Aquila, Italy, are evident everywhere, from the elaborate punto Venezia tablecloth and hand-loomed linens to Murano and other Venetian glass. Some glassware given to her by Giuseppe and Josephine Coletti, who met in Pittsburgh, is beautifully displayed in kitchen cabinets created by Tarr in the 1980s.
Arched glass doors installed over existing windows allow sunlight to illuminate the colorful and etched glass from behind — even on rainy days. Tarr’s custom cabinet doors are one of Coletti’s favorite parts of the house, and she left them intact when she recently updated the kitchen.
Other favorites include the three-steps-down powder room beneath the front staircase, and original fireplace mantels and tile surrounds in the third-floor bedrooms. She noted that the old firebacks stamped “East End Mantle and Tile” were reused in the English garden-style walls.
Among her inspired additions are a Theo Eichholtz Royal Master Sealight Pendant light in the kitchen and his Victorian Hotel Pendant in the dining room. Both came from Restoration Hardware.
