Haskett-Jay House, Sycamore Street, Kokomo, Indiana
It starts at the beautiful round front porch. Can't you just picture it with a huge Christmas tree and lots of lights and garland?
The living room is ready for carols around the piano...
the family room is ready for stories read by the fire...
while the dining room waits patiently to be wrapped in pretty (wall)paper:
The kitchen has been spruced up from top to bottom (notice its striking ceiling and floor)...
it just needs a little extra bling to finish it off, like this:
The same can be said upstairs, where the five bedrooms have been skillfully restored and are now just inviting us to imagine adding even more pretty details.
The house has 3,390 square feet, and some of the best of it is on the third floor. It apparently used to be a ballroom.
However, today it reads a little more like an old-fashioned nursery, like the one from Peter Pan:
If it were mine, I'd have a ball on this floor:
There's even a fireplace up there, just waiting for some stockings.
And speaking of stockings, the Haskett-Jay house is in the Old Silk Stocking neighborhood, on the National Register of Historic Places.
Its name was chosen to evoke the prosperity of the late 1800's when many of the neighborhood's grand houses were built. Kokomo had thriving industries and wealthy businessmen due to the abundance of natural gas in North Central Indiana. This 1886 newspaper article shows just how happy Kokomo was to discover their own well following earlier discoveries in Eaton, Indiana and Findlay, Ohio.
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Just down the street from the Haskett-Jay house is the later built 1891 Sieberling Mansion, with its own third floor ballroom, center tower, and round front porch.
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They hold Christmas tours there and kick things off with a lighting ceremony. Of course, nowadays it's with electricity -- imagine having to run that many gas lines!
That reminds me: add hang Christmas lights to that Christmas party to-do list.
The Old House Dreams listing is here.
