Health & Fitness
Lorton Mitchell, Builder of 100-Year Homes, Takes On Massive Restoration
CORONADO – In 1905 a storm hit our beaches with such fury it was labeled “The Century Storm.” That was in January. Trouble was, another hit in February, and another in March. The sea washed 110 feet of land away along Ocean Boulevard. The boulevard itself was no more, and homes were naked against a violent and unpredictable sea.
It was then that two homeowners decided to move their seaside dwellings inland, a process that involved uprooting the homes, placing them on logs, and slowly dragging the enormous structures across town using multiple teams of horses.
One of those classic homes, now located at 1000 Adella Avenue, is undergoing an extreme renovation designed to restore it to its original 1902 appearance. Coronado homebuilder Lorton Mitchell is conducting the ambitious restoration, one of the most unique renovations ever attempted.
Lorton Mitchell Custom Homes celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. The company has completed more than 100 projects in Coronado over the past three decades, some ranking as Coronado’s most beautiful and luxurious residences. Mitchell’s work is highly praised by both clients and professional peers for its design, quality, execution and longevity, and in this case, innovation.
This current restoration is called the Esrock Residence, after owners Bernard and Jill Esrock. The home, originally built in 1902 along Ocean Boulevard (at the corner of Loma Avenue), was known as the Kneedler Home, after Dr. William L. Kneedler, a retired Army doctor and personal physician to President William Howard Taft.
Later, on Adella Avenue, it was known as the Morton Home, owned by Dr. Paul Morton. Each of the past two phases have historic merit, so a major decision had to be made before reconstruction could begin.
“We’re going to take it all the way back,” said Mitchell. “We are attempting to match the details of the original home to regain that Nantucket beach house-look it once had.”
In restorations of this magnitude, Mitchell could be likened to an archeologist as he carefully scrapes away layers of the surface to reveal his treasure. In this case, that treasure is a lovely, turn-of-the-century Craftsman that has been modified and added to over the decades.
He examined old photos, researched early documents, and then, along with principal architect on the project, Dorothy Howard, decided the path they would take. Once that decision was made, and they received a blessing from the Historical Resource Commission and the homeowners, Mitchell and his team began the process of this very unusual restoration.
In 1905, the transported home was positioned on a bed of red brick and mortar. Mitchell’s challenge was not just creating a new foundation and building a basement for the new owners; he had to find a way to support the weight of the 111-year-old home. And here is where the inventive builder stepped outside the box.
“The big issue for us,” said Mitchell, “is that the foundation was shot, and it didn’t have adequate or seismically correct footings, requiring us to replace it anyway. When the new owners requested a full basement, we had to do some creative thinking.”
What they came up with was to surround the home with 17 large, metal columns – known as “soldiers.” These soldiers allowed Mitchell to shore up the walls of the building and keep out dirt as they dug the basement. But their most important duty will be to actually support the house by hanging it from beams connected to the tops of the soldiers.
“We will be running beams on top of the soldiers that run down into the ground and provide support for the basement. Then,” said Mitchell, saving the best for last, “we’ll take all the pressure off the foundation by literally floating the house in the air above it … dangling it, for lack of a better word.”
The floor will be lowered six inches to allow wheelchair access and ramping into the building, but the roofline will remain where you see it now. It’s an extraordinary solution for an unusual challenge, but because they didn’t hit groundwater until 20 feet, the work will all be dry, allowing for Mitchell’s crew to get in, do the work, and get out without too much risk.
Always one to pay attention to history and original materials, Mitchell has gone to great extremes to salvage and reuse as much of the original home as possible.
Old bricks under the house will be used on a perimeter skirt so the home looks like it’s on the original brick foundation. Much of the original redwood is also there. Mitchell’s team will mill it to make exterior trim, essentially salvaging century old vertical grain redwood that is no longer available.
“We’ve found a lot of existing elements from the original house, things like cornices and floor joists,” he said. “Also, the eaves are almost in perfect shape. They were well built to begin with and have survived the test of time.”
Part of Mitchell’s legacy in the next century will surely be his concern not just about specific homes he is building or restoring, but how he took into consideration the history of each home and calculated out how a project would affect the neighborhood it would reside in.
It’s unusually refreshing to find a homebuilder with a conscious and an awareness of Coronado history, such as Mitchell has. And, while many new homes in Coronado have 30-year lifespans, Mitchell refuses to sacrifice materials or time when creating or rebuilding a home.
“In architecture we define a building as a solution to a problem – home, security, etc.,” said Mitchell. “We try to build our homes to last at least 100 years. This is a 100-year house,” he said of the Adella restoration. “And that’s what we strive to build at Lorton Mitchell Custom Homes, houses that will also survive the test of time and last a century or more. Hopefully the Esrock Residence will last even another 100 years, once we’re through.”
Working on homes this old often reveals treasure of one sort or another. “The fun stuff is the articles we find,” said Mitchell. “We are always finding old newspapers in the stud bays. Sometimes the crew and I will sit around at lunch and read the old articles and advertisements. We love that. And I have a huge collection of old bottles we’ve found on building sites. But we’ve never found any money. Never even found a nickel,” he said laughing.
The history bug has severely bitten Lorton Mitchell around the ankles. Today, whatever home he is working on, he leaves contemporary newspaper front pages inside the walls and stud bays, newspapers that scream headlines such as “Obama Sweeps To Historic Victory,” “Bin Laden Killed,” or “Egypt Falls.” One of his workers, Justin Hardy, writes poetry. He often transcribes his poems inside the walls, again, to be discovered a century later, as a form of time capsule that surely will be appreciated by someone not even born as of this writing.
This release created by Joe Ditler and Part-Time PR. For more information write or call, josephditler@san.rr.com, or (619) 435-0767.
All photos courtesy of Coronado Historical Association, Lorton Mitchell Construction, and Joe Ditler.