We are running a story in this issue about a couple who lives in the Central West End. After their family grew, they determined they had outgrown their house and bought another a few blocks away.

But they didn’t move. Instead, they stayed and redid it topto bottom.

I get it. I have one of those houses.

Mine is a bungalow in Kirkwood. The sweet man I married and I bought it more than three decades ago from the incredibly talented designer Tim Rohan and his wife Ginny. We walked in, it was decorated to the nines and it was positively perfect. We put in our bid that day.

We’d been married a little over a year; we had one fine canine Boxer (not two) and we had no notion that we would be adopting the Great Ms. Kate from China. So, we moved in and years later, in a well-worn Kirkwood tradition, added on —a study for my husband, a second full bath, a walk-in closet and a study nook for Katie.

The house was built in 1890, one of the first on the Leffingwell plantation. The original owners stayed until their two elderly spinster daughters ended up in rehab. One was blind; the other taught geography at Mary Institute for nearly 50 years. A rehabber flipped it and Ginny Rohan (pre-Tim) bought it. Then they had a two-story addition and the prettiest shed built. That makes us only the third long-term residents.

The house is so old. So, so very old. It reminds us of it every day

Text: Christy Marshall