Key highlights:
- Explore the original 1920s Gothic-style architecture and design details
- Uncover the mystery of the “Red Room” and childhood ghost stories
- Learn renovation secrets: repurposed cedar, open kitchen design and luxe gathering spaces
- Reflect on emotional ties between homes and family history
Here is a conversation about how a historic estate in Melbourne Beach, Florida, transformed from a Gothic-style manor into a tropical villa.
Read the full article: How a renovation transformed my family's historic home
Transcript:
00:00 Over the years, the house was something of an attraction in the neighborhood. I would walk past the house, we would all sort of take excuses to go walk down the block.
00:09 I call that house stalking and it's perfectly normal.
00:12 It is perfectly normal.
00:31 Every home has a heartbeat, a history and a story to tell. Some speak through timeless details, others through bold reinvention, and sometimes a home does both.
00:42 Welcome to "Every Home Has a Story," a podcast from Homes.com. Today's episode takes us to Melbourne Beach, Florida, where a crumbling Southern-style manor has been reborn as a radiant tropical villa. It's a transformation that blends nostalgia with fresh design.
00:57 I'm Parker Leipzig with the Homes.com News Team and one of your guides on this house tour.
01:02 And I'm your host, Valerie Kellogg, an editor at Homes.com. Today, we welcome Homes.com staff writer Trevor Fraser. Trevor covers residential real estate in Central Florida, where he follows the trials and triumphs of this unique home region with professional passion and plain dumbfounded curiosity. It's also worth noting to all you real estate geeks out there that Trevor holds a master's degree in urban planning.
01:28 Welcome, Trevor.
01:29 Thank you. Great to be here.
01:30 So, Trevor, you recently wrote a story about the Melbourne Beach villa Parker introduced at the top of the podcast. It's a beauty. What's the story with this house?
01:39 Well, I think the interesting thing for it here is that it was my grandmother's house.
01:46 OK. So let's go through this. So you're looking at Homes.com all the time trolling the listings, right? What drew you to this? Did you recognize the house immediately? Did you look at the pictures and see the kitchen and imagine grandma making strudel?
01:59 I wish I had simply come across the house in my professional searchings. Before I had a chance to do that, my sister alerted to me to the fact that our old grandmother's house had gone on the market. She got an alert about it on her phone. I think she followed it on Homes.com actually.
02:18 Oh, wow.
02:19 So, yeah.
02:20 So you looked at the listings. Did you jump out of your chair when you saw it?
02:23 Oh my gosh. Yeah. No, it was incredible to see that it had happened. And for a second, I thought, Boy, that's a great story. I hope somebody tells the story of this house. And then remembered that I was a real estate reporter who was writing about this region and thought, "Oh, I think that's my job. I think I'm supposed to tell that story."
02:42 OK. So I want you to tell the story of the house because it really has an interesting backstory. But place the decade for me. How old were you? Just trying to set the scene for us.
02:55 Well, I mean, I first came to the house in 1980 when I was born. And it was not where I lived, but it was not far from ... My mother's house was about a mile away down the road. And so we would go there quite often, just my entire childhood up until I was 15 when my grandmother died and we'd wound up having to sell the house. But we spent an enormous amount of time there. But the house itself was built in the '20s. And I should clarify that when we're talking about the house that was built in the '20s, that's the main house.
03:31 And that was the Gothic-y?
03:33 That was the Gothic-y house.
03:33 All right.
03:34 That's the one that my grandparents bought. My father's parents bought that house in 1950. My father was born in 1951 in Michigan and then brought down and they all moved into that house. And they bought several of the houses around them and created the sort of acre property that has three guest houses on it and the pool and then the pathways in between it.
04:09 So you're describing it sort of ... Paint more of a word picture for us. So what did this place look like and what did it become over time?
04:17 Think of a sort of white Colonial formalist architecture. There were, I want to say, things like the balconies that had the railings, the sort of intricately carved railings and these sorts of things. But it, to a child, was just this enormous sort of overwhelmingly large symbol of what an estate was, of what a home could be. It was a thing that sort of cast big shadows was kind of how I looked at it.
05:06 So was it scary?
05:06 There were definitely a lot of eerie details to it. Now, I should clarify that if you were just looking at this house from outside, what you saw were these, they were all painted white, all of the guest houses and so on, they were all painted white and they just looked like this, it was sort of a combination between a French estate and a sort of Colonial American estate. And that was sort of the idea of big garden-
05:36 But what about the shadows? What are we talking about with the shadows?
05:38 Maintenance was starting to fall off on the house as I was a child, for various reasons within my family. But as that was happening, I, as a child, was watching the paint peel and seeing the darkened rooms and the corners and things that were just sort of going untouched. And the parts of the yard and the garden that were becoming massively overgrown and forming these very sort of gothic, just interesting places of overgrown ivy and plants and so on. That was all really inspirational to a child who you're looking for a place to have an adventure, you're looking for a place to come up with stories and games and things. And this just had all of that.
06:32 There was a space in the main house that you had a name for, right?
06:37 Oh, the red room. Yes. The red room-
06:40 The red room like "The Shining" or the red room like Trevor Fraser? What did you-
06:45 It's kind of a mix. No, the red room was this room that was in between, you had to pass through it to get to my grandmother's bedroom. You had to go from the hall through this room to get my grandmother's bedroom. There were no lights in this room. There were no windows into this room and no lights in this room at all. The only thing that I knew was in that room, and it was sort of pushed into the back in the dark, was this four-poster Victorian bed, full canopy covered in, and this might be where red room comes from, covered in a sort of red lace curtains and bedspread.
07:30 It was, again, the kind of thing that you see in a gothic novel about somebody lying in bed and dying. It was so mysterious. It felt like something out of a Victorian novel that the kid would come across.
07:51 Now I can visualize what you're talking about.
07:54 Yeah, I can see that would be terrifying.
07:57 It was. But again, as a child who loved, loved ghost stories.
08:03 Loved ghost stories, yeah.
08:03 Yeah. It was really inspirational. It was the kind of thing that really sort of brings you around to it.
08:11 You talk about your love for ghost stories, but if you could time travel to any time, any moment in the house's history, what would that be for you?
08:19 Well, if I could go to any time in the house's history, that would be when my father came home into the house. So it'd be in the '50s seeing the sort of life that my father and his parents had. His father passed away when he was 8 years old, so I never got to meet him. But I would've loved to have seen what their life in that house was like. If I could go to any time that I had ever been to the house, I would go back to my eighth birthday party.
08:48 What was so great about that?
08:49 Oh, it was this massive pool party. We had everybody in from my class had come to this. My mother had done this very elaborate planning with gifts and games and stuff that were all centered around the pool. And then right before my birthday party, I became injured and unable to swim. And I had to basically sit in a chair and watch all of my friends play in the pool and get all of the games and the prizes and things out of the pool. And then they would come and bring them to me like I was some sort of emperor and had to have things laid at my feet. So that was a very nice way to turn 8.
09:26 My mom had my eighth birthday party at McDonald's. So yeah, that was a nice way to turn 8. OK. So fast forward, when was the house sold?
09:36 So the house was sold in 1996, the year after my grandmother passed. And for various reasons, there were some tax liens on the house and as I said, the maintenance had sort of started to fall off. And because of this, the house sold for $550,000, which even at the time we recognized, everybody recognized, as undervaluing of the property. This is an acre property, three guest houses plus this main house set in just one of the most pleasant suburbs you can imagine. We're on the barrier island of Brevard County, Florida. It's east coast of Florida. We're half a mile from the beach. The house itself sits on the riverbank and has this sunset view of the river. I mean, it's a stunning property. You could move this to any other market and it could get $10, $15, $20 million today easy. It's strange how undervalued it is, but at the time that was way lower than it should have been.
10:45 Expert voices, local impact. Our journalists bring you sharp analysis and compelling stories from every corner of the U.S. housing market. See what our newsroom is uncovering at Homes.com/News.
10:56 So you got to tour the house for the first time in 30 years. What was that like? And this wasn't the first time you had been at the house since you were a kid, right?
11:06 Well, it kind of was. I visited ... Over the years, the house was something of an attraction in the neighborhood. I would walk past the house, we would all sort of take excuses to go walk down the block.
11:20 I call that house stalking and it's perfectly normal.
11:22 It is perfectly normal. And I do not think that the house's restraining order against me was warranted. But, we would go and look at the house and just sort of take it in. And one time we ran into our old gardener who was still working for the new family that owned it, and he got us in to take a little peek at what was going on. It was before the whole renovation had been done, but we saw just kind of the start of things and what was happening there. In my mind, all I really saw were the colors happening. I didn't know what was being done to the house until now.
12:02 So let's talk about the new house, the new Trevor house, grandma's new house. Talk about the grounds and all the amenities and the tchotchkes and everything.
12:14 So the property is largely ringed in this low brick wall with these black wrought iron fencing on it and so on. It's just a really beautiful sort of classy fencing there. And then you go through that into the grounds. The grounds are ... There's this great brick pathway that sort of connects all the guest houses and the pool and the main house and there are fountains in between inside the house. What I really love that they've done is they've found a lot of space to just create sitting and gathering spaces, just little foyers that sort of appear. When you go upstairs now, upstairs used to be three bedrooms and the red room-
12:56 And the red room, right?
12:57 The red room is gone now. The red room is a walkthrough closet and kind of goes into a Jack and Jill suite, but they have this great sitting area in between them where you can hang out and read and very, very comfortable, very open sort of. Downstairs, the kitchen has been opened. The kitchen also has been raised. When I was a kid, you came in through the kitchen and the kitchen was a couple inches lower than the rest of the house. And so there was a step that you had to go up to get into the main house. And I tripped on that step, I think, every time as a child, like maybe every time.
13:35 I would've done the same thing. I would do the same thing today.
13:38 And the only reason I realized that the kitchen had been raised was because I didn't trip when I was walking out of the kitchen and I suddenly went, "What happened here?" But yeah, no, that had been done. They put in this great island and so on. There was a room in the house that I only really knew for Christmas. It was a white room. It had wrought iron gates inside the house that led into this room.
14:05 OK. I'm trying to picture it.
14:07 It is now, the new house, they painted it this turquoise color, this very dark turquoise, and they have turned it into ... They put a bar in it and they've turned it into this sort of lounge. And so it's cool to see them use the house, to see it have the potential just to have people everywhere and sort of filling it with life anywhere in it.
14:30 So speaking of filling it with life, can you give us the backstory of the renovation and how much do you think has been ... Well, you may have reported this, so how much has been sunk into all of these changes?
14:43 Well, to be honest, we don't know. There's an owner between me and the people who are selling it now. Those are the people who did the renovations, and we don't know how much they spent on it, but we know it's over a million and it was probably closer to two. They sold it in 2004, but they are the ones who did the whole, whole redo. They apparently had gutted the entire house. I mean, the stairs are in a different place. So they had practically ripped it all down.
15:17 But one of the things that they did that was really neat was that they wanted to preserve a lot of it. And so for example, there was cedar ceilings, oak floors, those have been kept. Some of the cedar that was taken out was repurposed and put into balcony railings or in the wainscotting around the house. So there was a lot of effort to keep a lot of original pieces of the house while rearranging it entirely. It's an amazing transformation that they pulled off. I cannot imagine how much time they must have spent living in the guest houses while everything was going on in the main house.
16:00 Right. So is there a moment you felt personally moved by the family's connection to the house?
16:07 So for this story, I interviewed the people who own it and are selling it now. The wife of this couple, when she met her husband in college, and this was in 1985, she came down to his hometown of Indialantic, which is just north of Melbourne Beach. It's basically attached to Melbourne Beach. He told her, the first day they were there, he said, "I want to take you on a bike ride past this house I love." And he took her down to what they knew as the Fraser house. This is when it was very firmly in our hands. I was probably playing there at the time. They just loved the house. They would, again, take every excuse to go drive by it or look at it. They eventually moved to the area when he got a job in the area and so on. They built another house down in Melbourne Beach, but they always would look at that and just kind of dream about it.
17:01 And then there's a big Founders Day celebration in Melbourne Beach and they were on their way to Founders Day. It's at a park right across from the house. And so they were like, "Well, let's go look at the house." And this year that they were doing that, there was a for sale sign and it started their whole motor running on this and there were discussions and debates between them, but eventually they did wind up buying this house.
17:28 It's so wonderful to hear about another life and these other stories and so on that are coming out of that house, that that house is still generating that kind of life and those stories. And that made me really just touched to know that it's still kind of the thing that I was there for. It's just a continuity of the thing that I was in.
17:50 What do you think your story says about connecting to the past through living spaces?
17:57 Well, I think the really interesting thing to understand is, again, that when you leave a house, the house itself just continues that story. Your memories are yours and they're held in sort of that time with the house, but the house has the whole thing and it takes on the whole story. I mean, again, the people who originally built it had it for 30 years before my grandparents came along. What was that story and what were their memories with it and what would they be thinking about all of this?
18:32 So I think that there's just, it's really cool to see how those ... We don't get to ... There's the old line, you never get to go home again.
18:43 Right.
18:44 Yeah. And you don't. Again, you won't set foot in the same house because other people have lived in it and it's become their house. Whether it's renovated or not, it starts to take on their life. And that's just a really neat effect of humanity going on with its construction, with its projects. The things that we build hold what we have done.
19:08 Well, that's lovely.
19:09 Yeah.
19:09 As lovely as the house, we really appreciate you sharing the story, sort of getting a peek into the reporting process. So thank you for coming.
19:19 Well, thank you so much for having me. This was fun.
19:22 Thank you to our listeners for joining us on this journey through history, imagination and the power of home. Tune in next time to "Every Home Has a Story," and start your search today for more homes for sale at Homes.com. I'm Parker Leipzig with the Homes.com news team. I'll see you next time.
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The podcast was recorded in September 2025.