Photography by Matthew Hughes
Shahrdad Khodamoradi was stargazing in his dining room, admiring the kaleidoscopic patterns of deep sage, indigo and burgundy that formed an Islamic eight-pointed star on the ceiling and set the room’s Middle Eastern mood.
This was no ordinary papered ceiling. Dr. Khodamoradi collaborated with designers at the venerable firm of Bradbury & Bradbury to create the pattern, embellished with elaborate borders. The design was snap-chalked on the ceiling (that process alone took two days), and the hand-printed paper was precisely cut and installed—like puzzle pieces—to bring the design to life.
Even a year after the installation, Dr. Khodamoradi still liked lying on the floor to look at the stars. But then, one night, he noticed something amiss.
“I thought, ‘Why is there a sliver of white showing? There shouldn’t be any white showing,’” he recalls.
It should be said here that Dr. Khodamoradi (the name is Persian) is a perfectionist. Let’s just use this example: In choosing the grout for the kitchen in his Victorian mansion in Compton Heights, he wasn’t satisfied with just any gray grout. No, he wanted grout with the color and texture of age. So he visited the Stockstrom Mansion (also known as the Magic Chef Mansion) to examine its kitchen grout. It was, he noted, “nasty, dirty old grout.”
Dr. Khodamoradi wanted just that for his own kitchen—white glazed “bakery bricks” with grout turned shades of gray, the aftermath of being exposed to decades of cooking heat and grease. For his grout, he kept adding black powder, along with a little red, until he achieved the sooty hue that might be called “90 years of dirt in the grout.”
So when he looked up at the intricate starry pattern of his dining room ceiling, he wasn’t happy. He got a ladder to take a closer look.
The phrase “to his dismay” does not begin to convey Dr. Khodamoradi’s feelings when he discovered that the “skin” of the wallboard on the ceiling—installed by a previous owner to repair the plaster ceiling—was failing. Rather than avert his eyes and hope the ceiling took a long, long time to peel completely, Dr. Khodamoradi determined that the underlying surface needed a new skim coat.
“Imagine scraping $3,000 to $4,000 of hand-blocked wallpaper off the ceiling,” he says now, with no apparent bitterness. He applied a new skim coat and then primed it in preparation for repapering. Peter Bridgman, the California expert who installed the first ceiling, returned to install the second. He and Dr. Khodamoradi chalk-snapped the pattern, this time finishing the task in under four hours.
And then, as they began to paper, they made a discovery—the new surface, too, was failing.
“I began to furiously tear down the 1980s gypsum board,” he recalls. “And when I was just about done with that, a big piece of the original plaster broke off and hit me on the head.”
The third snap-chalking, months later, took only an hour. The dining room ceiling, clothed again in Bradbury & Bradbury, is one of the most striking features in a house full of striking features.
There is, of course, the wallpaper. Bradbury & Bradbury is known for silk-screened papers that recreate earlier eras, among them the Victorian period. Dr. Khodamoradi deftly—and boldly—mixed patterns and borders throughout, in a color scheme using sage green, cream, burgundy and indigo in proportions that vary from room to room. His father, who emigrated from Iran, sent Persian rugs for every room.
No detail was ignored. The oval leaded glass window in the den? Its design echoes a torch detail in the living room. And the curved window rods in the turret? Soft copper was shaped to fit, then plated with brass.
The three-story house was designed by Ernst Janssen and built in 1897 for German immigrants Charles and Emma Dieckriede, at a cost of $15,000. Dr. Khodamoradi had admired it for years before buying it in late 1997. At the closing, the previous owners handed him a photograph of the house taken 100 years earlier.
“That’s when I noticed the original chimneys, the original finial on the turret and all the urns that were missing from the dormers,” he says. “I also saw how the canopy over the porte-cochère originally looked. That’s when I knew I had to get the house back to that look.”
The outside restoration has been as meticulous as that on the inside. The crowning touch: the 10-foot finial that tops the turret.
All that was left of the finial’s galvanized structure by the time Dr. Khodamoradi bought the house was the rusted base, which had collapsed into a shapeless lump. The original finial apparently stood through the 1970s, but was eventually removed. The upper part of the spike was left, discarded, in the house.
Working with a friend, architect Jon Goeders, Dr. Khodamoradi measured what remained of the finial and its base, to provide a basis of design for the new structure.
And then they had a stroke of luck. Sister Dionysia Brockman of the Teaching Sisters of Notre Dame provided a glass negative of the house when it was newly built. The negative was part of a collection donated to the convent by a dentist who loved taking pictures of the Compton Heights houses.
With the crisp close-ups from the negative scanned into a computer and the actual measurements from the remains, the finial could be recreated. This time, it would be copper, to ensure its longevity. Along with the restoration of the chimneys, reinstallation of 20 missing urns and the rebuilding of a wrought-iron, copper and glass canopy over the porte-cochère, the installation of the finial completed the exterior renovation.
Maybe unexpectedly, considering its owner’s attention to detail, the house is not flawless. There is a faint shadow on the oak floor by the grand staircase where a piano clearly once stood. The floors have never been refinished, and there are places that show the passage of time and many footsteps.
“Anything original to the house, I tried to leave alone,” Dr. Khodamoradi says, “including the finish on the front doorknobs—one is more worn than the other.
“I wanted people to know which is the doorknob that people have been turning for 100 years. These are the ghosts of the house.”
