Luxury of Waste Space

The old house is getting to be the new thing. From the state of Washington to the District of Columbia, young families are moving out of their ticky-tacky little boxes and into the kind of mansion that used to be the white elephant of the real-estate trade.

Real-estate men themselves are beginning to grab the vintage houses. One such is John Fell Stevenson (Adlai's son). With his wife (the daughter of one of America's best-known modern architects, Nathaniel Owings) and son, he rented one of San Francisco's porched and turreted antiques, which was built in 1880 and more recently has been an old ladies' home.

Soundproof Partying. "The privacy is wonderful," says Mrs. Richardson Spofford, a biology professor at the University of Chicago, who lives with her accountant husband, their three-year-old son, her mother and a couple of students in the 18-room Tudor mansion that once belonged to the Wilson meatpacking family. "The rooms are virtually soundproof. My mother can be playing television full blast and I'll never hear it. When the annual community ball is given in our ballroom, Mother doesn't hear us."

Such all-out partying is a privilege of old-house inhabitants that Levittownsmen know not of. Manhattan Executive Edgar Smith has two large living rooms in his 1784 house in Morris Township, N.J., which enable adults and children to entertain separately. And in their 60-year-old stone house at Chestnut Hill, Pa., English Teacher Richard H. Tyre and his wife have been able to make an entire wing off limits for their three children (eleven, seven and two). With 24 rooms, they can afford to set aside one as a "Birthday Party Room," for "little kids with sticky fingers."

Children are in fact the most excellent and obvious reason for the trend. Dr. and Mrs. John Mumma of Bellingham, Wash., have nine, but there is plenty of running, jumping, dancing and shouting room in their magnificent 1903 mansion. The 30-foot-high ballroom is now more of a gym than anything else, but, says Mumma, "it will pay for itself through eight home weddings for the girls." The three children of Harvard Professor Jean-Claude Martin were comfortable in a six-room house, but they are blooming in the 17-room baroque relic of the 1870s that he bought two years ago in Newton, Mass. "Each of the children has a room of his own," says Mrs. Martin, "and they can sit in corners and read."

Warmer & Grander. In Atlanta there has been an influx of young families out of the suburbs and into Ansley Park--a settlement of houses about half a century old in the center of the city. Nelson and Sara Frank and their four children have ten main rooms and four baths, plus four porches. "You have to be sort of handy with things like a plasterer's trowel," says Sara Frank. "But it's so centrally located that you can walk a block to the public library and get a book on plumbing."

Deterioration in old houses is not the instant thing it is in Splitlevelsville, but it is expensive--three or four chimneys to point instead of one, and a far more formidable painting job every few years. Heating bills are also higher, and the cost of do-it-yourself housewifery and husbandry is incalculable. But taxes, the initial price and corresponding mortgage will probably be lower.

Over and above the economics of it is the fun. Those areas under the stairs that are so fine for hiding, the odd, unexpected rooms, the high ceilings--the wasted space, in short, which is so far from wasted. Says a Boston realtor who lives in a 74-year-old 15-roomer himself: "Of course, the basic appeal is a lot more room for less money. But beyond that--they're nicer, they're warmer, they're grander. You have the feeling that you're living in a real house."

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