5-bedroom home near Blanco, Texas combines antiques and architecture

“I was always going to build a house to fit this staircase,” said Twain, 74, a retired associate superintendent with the North East Independent School District. “The only reason this is a two-story house is because of that staircase.”

Because of all the work involved in building around architectural treasures, the house, which also includes a three-car garage/workshop, took two years to complete. It cost $600,000, plus an additional $100,000 for a circular driveway, raised flower beds, sidewalk and stone rear patio.

Twain’s interest in antiques started early. His dad was a carpenter and later opened an antiques business in Brenham. Twain and his two brothers often helped, refinishing and repairing furniture and other pieces in exchange for gas money.

Twain learned early there’s a big difference between antiques and what he calls “country junk.”

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“We sold a lot more country junk than anything else,” he said.

But they occasionally did find quality pieces, such as bed frames, mirrors, dressers and the staircase that is now the showpiece of the couple’s new home, greeting visitors entering through the front door.

Twain’s father rescued the staircase in 1971 from a home in Brenham that was being torn down to make way for a Dairy Queen.

“My dad bought all the woodwork in the house, from the baseboards to the trim to the doors,” he said. “He couldn’t pay us to help take it all out, so he told me if I wanted the staircase, I could have it. We took it apart in pieces, and I stored it in the back of my father’s store.”

Twain believes the staircase was built in the 1890s and said he was told the home it was taken from was once owned by members of the Kruse family of Blue Bell Creameries.

Installing the staircase in the new home proved a challenge. The staircase has 51 fluted spindles that support the banister as it makes a graceful turn up to the second floor. He numbered them all, but over the years they had to move the staircase several times, and after half a century in storage, the markings had mostly faded away. 

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“The spindles might look like they’re all the same length, but they’re not,” he said. “I spent two weeks trying to figure out the puzzle of which ones go where.”

He also had to craft a number of trim pieces to make it look like the elegant staircase had been built in place.

Indeed, many of the architectural pieces scattered throughout the house were crafted from odds and ends he’d collected from his father’s shop, during antiquing trips he and Francene take, and on eBay.

The front door, for example, was reclaimed from a house being demolished back in the 1990s, but Twain crafted the elaborately detailed trim that surrounds it. The trim above the door was pieced together from parts of an old bed headboard, and he and Seguin-based carpenter Marcus Heminger made the fluted pilasters running down the sides of the door in his workshop in the garage.

Near the front door, the hall tree where coats, bags and hats are deposited at one time had a pair of arms on either side of the seating bench. But these are gone, so they crafted new ones made from leftover staircase railing, adding two small lion heads Twain had bought.

Meanwhile, several nearby windows are trimmed with rosewood millwork cannibalized from old bedrails and other pieces he’d stored away for years.

“You can’t buy rosewood anymore because it’s protected,” he said. “But I got this wood from my dad, who had it even before we took the staircase down.”

Although Twain has no formal architectural training, he was the driving force behind the home’s construction.

“I was the general contractor, although I did work with an architect,” he said. “But I did all the measurements to make sure all the pieces would fit myself.”

In the front entryway, for example, he ensured that one wall was at least 5½ feet wide to accommodate the hall tree. He also conceived most of these mix-and-match creations himself.

“You just start laying out the pieces,” he said, explaining the process. “And then you go, OK, we’re going to cut this here and attach it there. And we have a transition piece to fill in here, right? So we’ll cut some stuff and make it look like it’s Victorian.”

Nailed, glued or otherwise cobbled together, most look as if they were intended to be a single piece from the same source.

“It’s hard to throw away a good piece of oak or walnut that’s been worked on by a craftsman,” he said. “I like giving the pieces, especially when they’re 100, 150 years old, a new life.”

Not everything in the new house is an antique, however. Other than several of Twain’s collection of old-timey whiskey jugs lined up atop the cabinets, the kitchen is completely, sparklingly new.

Large and open, it has views into the living room from one angle and the dining room from another. At the center is a 10-foot, quartz-topped island with five stools running along one side, one for each of the couple’s grandchildren.

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The room is painted a shade of gray that Francene, 73, a retired director of health services from the North East ISD, said can look like many different colors, depending on the lighting.

“It took me a while to choose the exact shade,” she said. “I had, like, 20 samples of gray trying to figure out which shade I liked.”

Off the kitchen, the formal dining room glistens with china and glassware, and the table can be set for a formal service for up to10, like something out of “Downton Abbey.” Behind it and running the length of the 14-foot wall are glass-fronted and topped upper and lower cabinets filled with Francene’s extensive china and crystal collection, including their wedding tableware, which they received as a gift in 1971.

Twain bought cabinets in Uvalde in 1976 and said that at one time, they were display cases in a retail store. Because the original glass had long gone missing, he had to buy new, deciding to install glass fronts rather than wood cabinet doors.

“I wanted Francene to be able to display her china and crystal,” he said. “The sets go back to her mother and grandmother, as well as my mother, too.”

Other architectural antiques sprinkled throughout the house include reclaimed doors, several that were painted and topped with old-style transoms.

“When I bought them, the transom glass was missing or broken,” he said. “So I had to strip them and stain them and replace the glass. That’s Florentine glass I got out of an old post office at the Warrenton Antique Show.”

The pine baseboard used throughout the house was flooring taken from an old barn outside San Marcos that was slated for demolition for a road widening.

Many of the cased openings between rooms are topped with detailed pieces salvaged and married with other broken or partial Victorian furniture. 

The main bedroom features an armoire dating from the 1890s that came from Twain’s father’s shop; it was stripped and restained to its former glory. In another corner is a marble-topped dressing table purchased at an estate sale.

Despite its beauty, Twain holds little hope that all this antique furniture is intrinsically valuable.

“There’s no market for this kind of furniture today,” he said. “The kids living in those apartments up and down Broadway don’t want it, so the bottom has dropped out of the market. You can buy this furniture for pennies on the dollar.”

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