230 West Trinity Ave.

36.005715, -78.89853

230
West Trinity Avenue
Durham
NC
Cross Street
North Street
Year built
1930-1939
Architectural style
Colonial Revival
Construction type
Frame
National Register
North Durham – Duke Park
Neighborhood
Old North Durham
Use
Residence
Building Type
Residential
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230WTrinity_1981.jpg

1981

Large two story Colonial Revival style. Much of form and style lost due to extensive renovation. Front porch converted to room; second story balustrade.

230WTrinity_030610.jpg

03.06.10

Interestingly, the most recent occupants of this house took a historic house with "form and style lost" according to the above Nat'l Register notation and added technology to reduce energy usage/resource consumption. Their efforts with this house are chronicled in a book, The Carbon-Free Home. This effort is a neat challenge to the orthodoxy of preservation - particularly as preservation seeks to adopt elements of 'green' in order to find science-based relevance. How much do we really value the reduction in resource consumption - versus design, and versus 'historic purity'. 

The answers aren't simple - and preservation folks are often desperate to make them so, because the subjectivity makes the 'standards' weak when attacked, and undermine the justification for historic tax credits. 

(Painting of this house has been completed since I took this picture.)

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Comments

Submitted by Stephen (not verified) on Tue, 12/3/2013 - 5:06pm

This is my house. My two focuses have been preservation and conservation. My remodel of this house (ever on-going, of course) represents these two loves, so challenging to successfully integrate. To my mind, preserving architecture without there being a habitable planet to live in is pointless.

230 W Trinity Ave was built in 1932 by the Christian family. It wraps around the corner of North St, and the mother-in-law apartment, built simultaneously, has the address 1100 North St (the only address in the 1100 block of North, btw). Mrs. Christian survived her husband by many decades and lived there alone in the front, according to my neighbors at 228. During my renovation, I was able to piece together some of the history of this house, which has a simple yet beautiful interior with a few graceful arches, oak floors, and art deco hardware still in place. The left-hand porch, right enclosed room, and upper level balustrade are part of a 1963 renovation (based on stamped lumber I found during reno). Originally I am fairly certain that the front door was directly in the middle in the front with a few step walk-up (these are no missing, replaced by the porch and room). A bathroom was also added at this time. In fact the window just to the right of the front porch door is the bathroom window, looking out onto the street, right at head level. Quite funny.

Mrs. Christian portioned out the front of the house (230 W Trinity) to at least two other sets of renters. At the time of my purchase, there were three separate electric meters to that side. I believe she lived in the small room up front.

I forget the last name of the guy I bought the house from, Sean someone. He purchased the property in 1996 from Mrs. Christian's heirs. He rented the property out for the decade until I bought it, with little done to restore it.

In Gary's picture above, you can see the removal of the lead paint that was polluting my garden. I hit a trifecta with this property: lead paint on everything, a leaky oil tank buried in the back yard, and asbestos all over the radiator pipes in the basement. I'll upload some better looking pics soon, but now I've got a birthday party to attend.

I purchased the house in 2006 with my ex-wife Rebekah, with the idea of taking a existing house and retrofitting it to use as little fossil fuels as possible.

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