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The kitchen underwent the biggest transformation after a butler pantry was removed. The Seymours added new tile, counters, cabinets and fixtures in the expanded space.
An upstairs room that previous owners used as a closet is now home to Barbara Seymour’s home office, which she affectionately calls the “Harry Potter cottage” because of its fun shape.
The bathroom underwent a complete transformation with new tile, tub, shower and fixtures.
The backyard was a blank slate upon which Barbara and Daniel Seymour added a fenced in-pool area with seating, tables, storage, a grill and a mini-fridge.
This bathroom used to be a den and small bathroom but now is large enough to include a laundry area.
Barbara and Daniel Seymour fell in love with the area and with the character of this cottage at 602 Mulberry Road. Their renovations kept many of its unique features.
Barbara and Daniel Seymour, who bought the brick cottage at 603 Mulberry Road in in November 2020, say the house’s character and history enchant them.
Barbara Seymour’s new job at the hospital brought them from Rockledge, Florida, to the area. “When I came here, I just fell in love with the people,” she said. They officially moved in on New Year’s Day 2021.
Seymour had been provided with a real estate tour by the hospital, where she was connected with Mary Rives Brown of Berry-Elliot Realtors.
“I was just amazed with some of the architecture in the area,” Seymour said. “I was a little bit shocked coming from a busy place in Florida … but when we came down Mulberry and started to come into this area, the homes are just phenomenal.”
Houses were being bought up quickly when the Seymours were looking, she said, and when they saw their house in person Brown told them someone else was coming to see the house later in the day. They quickly put an offer on the house, and it was accepted.
“We fell in love with the house,” Seymour said. “I mean I fell in love with it online, but we walked in and we knew this was the house that we wanted, even though it didn’t look anything like it looks now.
“It’s super charming. There’s just so many details of it that we loved,” she added.
They learned about the story of the house, built and first lived in by Dorothy Goodman, and they found pieces of character throughout the house from past residents, she said.
The deed to the house says that the house was built in 1933, Seymour said, but a neighbor told them the house most likely was built before then, so it may be older than they know.
“We’ve always purchased homes that we’ve had to do work on,” she said. “And I’ve always kind of wanted things to be new and shiny … but there were so many neat imperfections in the house that we just didn’t want to touch because the house — it feels like it has a story, and we just loved that part of it.
“We wanted to start our own story in a house that already had a great story to it,” she said. She pointed out a burn mark on the original wood flooring that had been left behind from Goodman’s iron and all kinds of scratches and dings that she loves to “imagine how they got there.”
The front yard of the house is lush, green and full of flourishing plant life. At the entrance to the house is a large, rounded door they had made from black walnut wood from her father’s farm in Kentucky.
To the left of the front door is a living room with grey-blue walls with white accents, plush furniture and a fireplace that the Seymours painted white. Through that room is a room with large, open windows on each wall letting in natural lighting for whoever wants to play the piano the Seymours have there.
To the left of the front door is a dining room which the couple left fairly untouched aside from ceiling repair and new paint and lights. Through the dining room is the kitchen, which Seymour said was one of the places they had the most work done.
They took out a butler’s pantry that took up half of the space the kitchen now occupies. They exposed some natural brick; installed new counters, cabinets and fixtures; put in new honeycomb-patterned tile; and removed a built-in cabinet to use upstairs. Once that cabinet was removed, they found some wood that they used to make a hood vent for their stove.
The wood for the hood vent features the name of the original builder of the house, J. B. Fuqua, who Seymour said was a prominent builder in the area who built some courthouses in Virginia.
“We really tried to think about modernizing the house but making it look like it was always this way,” she said.
They transformed what used to be a den and small bathroom into a master bathroom and laundry room. They also updated and modernized the upstairs bathroom as well, putting in a stand-alone tub and shower combination behind a glass wall.
A room upstairs that Seymour said the old owners used as closet was turned into what Seymour calls her “Harry Potter closet,” because of its small size. The way its walls pitch toward the ceiling make the room look triangular and Seymour uses it as her office now that she works from home.
The backyard, she said, was pretty much a blank canvas when they bought it, so they added a fenced-in pool area with a food preparation area that features a mini-fridge, grill and storage, a home garden and plenty of outside seating. Also in the backyard is the old garage that they updated and repurposed into a home gym.
Seymour said that when they had work done on the yard, one of the people they hired mentioned that he used to mow Goodman’s grass when he was a teenager. “There’s so much great feel and connection to the house that we absolutely loved,” she said.
Monique Holland is a reporter for the Martinsville Bulletin. She can be reached at monique.holland@martinsvillebulletin.com or at 276-734-9603.
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The kitchen underwent the biggest transformation after a butler pantry was removed. The Seymours added new tile, counters, cabinets and fixtures in the expanded space.
An upstairs room that previous owners used as a closet is now home to Barbara Seymour’s home office, which she affectionately calls the “Harry Potter cottage” because of its fun shape.
The bathroom underwent a complete transformation with new tile, tub, shower and fixtures.
The backyard was a blank slate upon which Barbara and Daniel Seymour added a fenced in-pool area with seating, tables, storage, a grill and a mini-fridge.
This bathroom used to be a den and small bathroom but now is large enough to include a laundry area.
Barbara and Daniel Seymour fell in love with the area and with the character of this cottage at 602 Mulberry Road. Their renovations kept many of its unique features.
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