Who doesn’t love a comeback story? Tina Turner’s 1980s return to performing, vinyl records, Legos, Pamela Anderson—it’s always heartening to see someone or something whose star has dimmed suddenly burst back onto the scene, proving they’ve still got a few tricks left up their sleeve.

The new owners of this gracious West End residence were able to look past the faded beauty of the structure, a beloved home for some 60 years that the former residents had done very little to maintain. “It looked like a house in need of some renewed love,” recalls the husband of the empty-nester couple who purchased the nearly 4,300-square-foot John Calvin Stevens gem erected in 1902 for a prolifically published early-twentieth-century ornithologist. “The bones of the home were so inviting,” he says. “And the rooms weren’t massive; there was an intimacy to the spaces.”

The facade hardly presented its best face. “The house had been covered by vines, which destroyed the mortar,” explains architect Nancy Barba of Barba and Wheelock. “The entry steps had deteriorated and were a bit awkward, with a small brick landing and steps coming up sideways parallel to the house.” She adds that the front door was in poor condition too and that “the driveway came right past the entry to the old carriage house, bifurcating the property.” A makeover was in order, but Barba and Wheelock’s respect for preservation required that it be carried out with sensitivity for Stevens’s original intentions.

Other than a face-lift, what was needed was a practical update for contemporary living. “We wanted to maintain the integrity of the house,” says the wife, “but the toilets didn’t have to be wall-hung,” referring to the early 1900s tanks suspended near the ceiling with a flush cord. So Barba devised an approach that she says was more “surgical,” lightly modernizing spaces while preserving details such as mouldings, built-in pantry cabinets, and an elegant switchback staircase.

“The windows all had to be restored,” says Matthew Brewer, co-owner of the contracting firm M.R. Brewer. “We took them all out and brought them to our facility, refurbished them, then brought them back and redid all the ropes and weights.” Barba had insisted the wood windows be restored rather than replaced because, she says, “They had a patina and authenticity.” Ditto for the storm windows: “We didn’t want a lot of aluminum to go into a landfill.”

Brewer also restored the front door (including the leaded glass lights around it) and designed others to replace the ones inside that could not be salvaged. A particularly ingenious solution was the doors he devised for the new laundry closet on the second floor, which look like double doors to the eye. However, they are really two bifold doors that present as two panels rather than their actual four.

Mouldings, too, are a mixture of old and new. Interior designer Judith Schneider says, “There should be some continuity to the trim, so it should remain the same throughout the house.” Brewer assured her, “We have a bit to match any profile,” so making replacement moulding wasn’t a challenge. “The difficulty in restoring it comes when a moulding is heavily painted,” he says. “They can also be brittle or have cracks.” The team went through all of it, bit by bit, thoughtfully determining what could be preserved and what needed replication.

Overall, however, Barba says the house’s condition was solid—just dated. “The previous owners had lived there since the 1950s and hadn’t done much with it. Their priorities were elsewhere. The top floor hadn’t been lived in for a while, and the basement wasn’t finished.” Barba repurposed some spaces—for example, finishing the basement to accommodate an office for the husband, appropriating a bedroom for the wife’s office—and reconfigured others (closing one passageway from the dining room to the kitchen to create a powder room). Barba and Wheelock also designed an addition to the house toward the rear of the lot to provide a more commodious back entry and mudroom at grade. Additionally, the firm widened the narrow entries between some spaces to open up the floor plan in an airier, more contemporary way.

The aforementioned carriage house wasn’t deep enough or wide enough for two cars, so it became what the team refers to as “the Folly.” Essentially, reimagining the garage within an eighteenth-century tradition of garden fantasy structures involved removing the facade and installing aluminum-framed folding glass doors, exposing the ceiling, and transforming it into a combination of extra entertaining space and potting shed. It’s indicative of the lightheartedness of the whole project that they refer to this as a folly, which was usually a decorative structure found on a sprawling estate that had no utility.

Of course, this made the driveway obsolete, so it was jackhammered out. Landscape designer Lucinda Brockway of Past Designs rethought the yard, creating a two-level patio to the left of the Folly for lounging and dining. Barba and Wheelock designed a new one-car garage with an adjacent driveway at the corner of the lot across from the residence’s main entry. Along the boundary of the quarter-acre-plus property, Brockway planted a combination of yew hedging, hydrangea-covered lattice (to disguise the new garage), evergreen shrubs, specimen trees—Japanese white pine, Stewartia, American redbud, Styrax—and lined these plantings with bulbs such as tulips, daffodils, and alliums.

After repointing the bricks on the exterior, Barba and Brockway conjured a grander granite entry landing flanked by Corten steel planters “to bring the mass of the landing down,” Barba explains. Brockway designed a self-contained miniature landscape of weeping cherry trees and more bulbs and ground cover in these modern planters. It is the sort of amalgamation of old and new that guided every aspect of the project.

Back inside, Schneider recalls that the wife of the couple “drove all the decisions and had definite ideas about what she wanted.” Her client had already chosen the living room sofa fabric and the powder room wallpaper, and the couple arrived at the scene with Herman Miller chairs and an old French farm table for the dining room, a French armoire for the living room, and various heirloom pieces that today are scattered around the house. But the wife relied on Schneider, who is also a painter, for her color sense. One striking choice she made was a pale pink—drawn from a painting in the foyer—that Schneider introduced in the foyer, continued up the stairs, and used to swathe the living room and dining room. “It’s fabulous to have a shade that is white in the day but a real color during the night,” she notes.

The overall effect of this color feels lighter and more modern than the age of the house. That facilitated the incorporation of midcentury and contemporary furnishings and lighting and highlighted the architecture. “When you have good bones, you should show them off,” Schneider believes.

John Calvin Stevens, if he were around today, would certainly approve. The house is recognizably what it was, just as Tina Turner was unmistakably the Tina Turner we all remembered when she reemerged onto the music scene. It feels older, wiser, and fresher, just like any good comeback act should.