Sun archive: Dream Home

July 5, 2009

Dream Home

Dream Home: Solace in the city

Peering into the front window of their future home, all that AMY Grace and Karen Blood could see was a center spiral staircase. They were hooked.

June 28, 2009

Dream Home

Dream Home: City lifestyle draws suburban couple

When children grow up and leave home, many parents decide to do the same. For empty-nesters Laurie and Robert Weitz, the decision to start over has been a positive one.

June 21, 2009

Dream Home

Dream home: Place on a hill boasts million-dollar view

Lisa Pattisall found her dream home the moment she turned her car into its long, winding driveway dotted with evergreens and weeping willow.

June 14, 2009

Dream Home

Dream home: Sharing their house is their business

Here is a smidgen of information Barry Werner shares with visitors to his home, which doubles as a business: As a child, he used to play a game of "bed and breakfast" with his grandmother.

June 7, 2009

Dream Home

Dream home: Perfect homes sometimes come that way

Back in 2003, friends of Greg Alexander and Paul Williams told them they had found the perfect house for the couple. Five years later, it appears the friends were spot on.

May 31, 2009

Dream Home

Dream Home: Darlington colonial dates to 1810

Two years ago, Jeff Little decided he had enough of the sheep and goats and big barns on his farm in Churchville, Harford County.

May 24, 2009

Dream Home

Dream Home: Baltimore Co. town house features owner upgrades

As Isabella Litchka awaits her husband's return from a business trip, she puts the finishing touches on a home project she has been working on in his absence - the placement of crown molding running along the base of the first-to-second-floor staircase.

May 17, 2009

Dream Home

Castle in a Kit

When Todd Taylor suggested to his wife of three decades that they become the fourth generation to live in his family's Sears Roebuck kit house in Ellicott City, she thought he was kidding. They couple had finally gotten their place the way they liked it, and the old homestead needed more than substantial work.

May 10, 2009

Dream Home

Wall of glass acts as a true charmer

It is easy to overlook the stunning black lacquer piano just inside the marble-tiled entrance of Bill Magruder and Stanley Scherr's Mount Washington home. Only a focused eye would spy anything other than the spectacular wall of glass just beyond the foyer.

May 3, 2009

Dream Home

House blends with nature

In 2002, Lisa and Thomas Baum got engaged on a craggy mound of land overlooking the Patapsco River. Today, the couple, three grown boys, a baby son and a golden retriever named Jasmine live together on that craggy mound in the house the couple designed together and called "River Knoll."

April 26, 2009

Dream Home

St. Mary's waterfront home open for tour

A winding road narrows in St. Mary's County toward the tip of a peninsula. Here, a partially hidden entrance with a sign that reads "St. Marie's" heralds the home of Loretta "Tiny" and Francis Taylor.

April 19, 2009

Dream Home

Victorian 'painted lady' was built in 1907

Jeanne Knight refers to her 1907 Charles Village row house as "last gasp Victorian," a description that speaks volumes about the neighborhood and its architecture. While the houses immediately to her north are of Arts and Crafts design, hers bears the hallmarks of late Victorian construction.

April 12, 2009

Dream Home

From candy factory to dream home

Frank Weatherly's 1983 acquisition of a vacant candy factory in downtown Lancaster, Pa., was a purchase negotiated, for the most part, out of necessity.

April 5, 2009

Dream Home

Tranquil setting for her life's new chapter

Tina Pierce knew for a long time that one day she and her husband would downsize, sell their Mount Washington home and purchase a condo. The two had always envisioned themselves amid the bustle of downtown.

March 29, 2009

Dream Home

Colonial as a personal canvas

In June 2004, Randy Woods and Dwayne Harrison purchased a three-story Georgian-style home in the bucolic Baltimore neighborhood of Ten Hills.

March 22, 2009

Dream Home

Preservationists bought house with history

In October 1996, a northern Baltimore County newspaper ran a notice of public auction for a historic farmhouse.

March 15, 2009

Dream Home

Hollywood glamour meets Homeland

Shari Elliker and Treavor Erney had no illusions about the half-million-dollar house they purchased last August in northern Baltimore's Homeland. The three-story Georgian-style home, solidly built of fieldstone in 1928 and placed among similar mansions in the Olmsted-designed neighborhood, was a majestic site to behold - from the street.

March 8, 2009

Dream Home

Sweet Retreat

The white house on San Domingo Creek in St. Michaels is where Jeanne Ruesch has taken to stretching summer weekends into five days with extended family and friends.

March 1, 2009

Dream Home

Couple has no regrets over move to Hunt Valley condo

When Agnes and Leroy Hawthorne grew weary of having grass to cut, snow to shovel and stairs to climb at their Northeast Baltimore home, the retired Baltimore County teachers thought the time was right for a permanent vacation spot.

February 22, 2009

Dream Home

Dream home steeped in history

In December 1986, Patricia Schooley and her husband, Dave, were looking to purchase a very old house on 5 to 10 acres somewhere in the Mid-Atlantic region.

February 15, 2009

Dream Home

Dream home: The Ritz-Carlton Residences

After 30 years in three different northern Baltimore County residences, Maxine Blume decided it was time for a change. Since all of her previous houses were resales, the 54-year-old Long & Foster Realtor promised herself a newly built home. In addition, she and her husband, Dr. Michael Blume, a gastroenterologist at Good Samaritan Hospital, also wanted a change of venue: the city as opposed to the suburbs.

February 7, 2009

Antiques dealers live where they work

At 6 o'clock every evening, the Dandie Dinmont terriers are let out of the back room, Greg Sullivan turns the key to close up his antique shop, and - that quickly - he's home.

January 31, 2009

Chestertown B & B is business and home

Bob and Susan Lathroum had always dreamed of owning and operating a bed-and-breakfast. So 11 years ago, when Bob lost his third management job in 15 years, the couple decided the time was right to pursue that dream. The quest led them from Linthicum to Chestertown on the Eastern Shore.

January 24, 2009

Mount Vernon silversmith's shop is below home

From the time Henry Hopkins III ("Hoppy" to all who know him) was 15, he worked in his dad's Mount Vernon silversmith's shop. A former carriage house built in 1897, the building was converted to a shop in 1936, with an apartment above in the space that had been the hayloft.

January 17, 2009

Kent Island Colonial features themed rooms

Adam and Andrea Weinstein's 12-year-old house on Kent Island was in move-in condition when they bought it in 2006, so Andrea Weinstein was able to start decorating its 14 rooms immediately.

October 4, 2008

Dream Home

On house hunt, it paid to get lost

Like many of us, Susan Clayton wished for a home near enough to her job so that she could walk to work every day. A co-owner of the Clark Morley Salon in downtown Baltimore, she had been driving from her home several miles north of the Inner Harbor.

May 16, 2008

Dream Home