Joy Christensen couldn’t stop daydreaming about a house on the corner of 12th and Lami in Soulard. The former radio personality and restaurant owner has long had a soft spot for historic architecture. In 2015, the year she first spotted the house with a leaky Mansard roof and marbled—albeit warped—front panels, she and her husband, Ron Christensen, were living a few miles west in another historic home. Over two decades, they restored every inch of that property’s 12,000 square feet, built for the founder of soda-cracker company Nabisco. But the drive to resuscitate old houses and commercial buildings had come with a cost. Christensen’s next project, she declared, wouldn’t be like the others: “I don’t want any plaster. I want to see my conduit. I want to see my plumbing,” she says. So how, then, did she wind up living in one historic house, while restoring another that she describes as “the complete opposite” of what she wanted?
“I drove by the house, just like everybody does, and you go, ‘Oh, look at that house,’” she says.
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“And then, you stop and go, ‘Look at that house.’”
From the moment Christensen laid eyes on it, she says, she was in love. Though the property wasn’t for sale, she began contacting neighbors, friends, anyone who might know something about it. Scaffolding covering what appeared to be a brick box on the side of the house offered some clues as to the condition of the exterior, but no one—not even the former “garden guy from KMOX,” who lived in the carriage house—seem to have ever been inside the main house. “I just assumed, since most people keep the inside up and let the outside go, that the inside would be better,” says Christensen. In time, she managed to reach one of the owners by phone. Her husband might be interested in selling, the wife told Christensen. On the day that the two families were to meet in person about the sale, the smell of mold emanating from the house “almost knocked me out,” recalls Christensen. From the foyer, she could see plaster hanging from the ceilings, holes in the floor, and missing steps on the staircase. “I’m like, ‘What?!’ I couldn’t even process it, I was so stunned.”
Frank Arzt, an obstetrician, immigrated from Austria to St. Louis in 1867. Ten years later, he built his house in the Second Empire style and introduced residential radiant heat to St. Louis homeowners. Arzt married his housekeeper, a woman with a degree in domestic science, and they had four children; two of them survived into adulthood. The home’s cave sparkles with stalactites and stalagmites—one dating back a million years—from Missouri caves, shining a light on Arzt’s interests in geology and mineralogy. Up a level, the rebuilt solarium with handmade, arched windows, draws natural light into the house. In Arzt’s time it was a greenhouse, a laboratory for his study of botany. The home’s original owner, according to Christensen, once held the record for the largest night-blooming cereus cactus, measuring 20 by 50 feet.
The renovation challenges came fast and furiously for the new owners. “It was like somebody took a Victorian beaded bag, and threw it in a box, and the beads are all over the place. And then, someone added beads from some other bag and, you know, you’re supposed to put it back together,” says Christensen. A temporary shortage of walnut, used throughout the house, including on the main floor where striped walnut and ash were discovered under layers of linoleum and tar, prompted a hunt for suppliers from Illinois to Ohio. Sourcing the right antique brick turned into a game of hurry up and wait. “I’d have to go and make friends with the brick guys and wait until they got a shipment that would be appropriate for the house,” Christensen says.
Over the course of eight years, about 150 workers walked in and out of the house, but only a handful of trusted partners emerged. Eric LaVelle, a millworker from Belleville, was one of them. He had not only the expertise but also the right equipment, behemoth planing machines dating back more than 150 years that he used to recreate intricate rope moulding and match the original size of the hand railing, among other details. Together, he and Christensen kickstarted the project by sorting through discarded ironwork around the house and fitting it back into place like a puzzle along the roof’s cresting. To fill in the gaps, LaVelle made a wood template of the design and sent it to a foundry to be replicated. “I was giddy. I was elated because we actually did something,” says Christensen, at that time two years into the project. “But that was nothing. We were nowhere.” Redoing the woodwork was, as Christensen describes it, one of “several juggernaut hell jobs” because every surface had to be either restored, repainted, or given a faux bois finish that Christensen took on herself. Four years into the project, the discovery—and extermination—of termites turned into another of those juggernaut jobs. “I assumed what was causing the tower to sag was the weight of the water in the pipes, but it wasn’t,” Christensen says. “It was termites eating away at the structure of the house.” Ridding the house of the pests took two tries. About a year or so after the first go-around, Christensen zeroed-in on a lower-level closet that had always appeared “mushy” to her. She decided to rip it out, she says, ending once and for all her saga with the termites. Halfway through the project, Paul Ivkovich, a carpenter with an eye for precision, walked onto the scene, redoing the size of the stairs leading up to the third-floor tower, rebuilding the intricate walnut skirt board along the main staircase, and leaving his artistic mark in the form of a beautiful inlay pattern at the foot of the rear entrance. “I couldn’t have done it without him, and I tell him that all the time,” Christensen says.
Despite Christensen’s vow to avoid plaster surfaces, there was no way around them at the new house, where specialists recommended tearing out the ceilings or skim-coating them in the front parlor and dining room. The estimated $14,000 to repair just one of the rooms was also quickly dismissed. Cracked and covered in soot from decades of burning oil lamps, the rooms’ surfaces needed to be cleaned, too. Christensen, and painter and handyman Tom Hardy, started there, climbing up ladders to scrub with bleach, Dawn, and finally, vinegar. The pair succumbed to repairing the plaster themselves, filling in cracks to avoid hitting the original steel-railroad beams that Arzt used to build the house, and Christensen, with her deft artistic talent, repainted the borders. A scrapbook stuffed with newspaper clippings and stacks of old photos helped guide the restoration, revealing visual evidence of a wall board or the shape of a corbel—even the original location of Arzt’s study, which is today’s dining room, and holds his two bookcases.
There was a time, not too long ago, when Christensen would pull up to the house, sit in the car, and will herself to build up enough fight to go back inside. These days, she’s through all the hard stuff. Her kitchen addition, which relocated the room from the lower level to the main level, is also finished. “The house is so tiny and fancy, but we love it, and we have everything,” she says. Last May, The Missouri Alliance for Historic Preservation honored Christensen with the 2024 Preserve Missouri Award. “It was overwhelming. I cried,” she says. This time the tears were of joy.
