Nice home, great neighbors

In Phyllis Kryven's Downingtown neighborhood, folks are OK with seeing one another's laundry fluttering in the breeze. It's the kind of place where friends gather in the street to trade news. Where people retrieve the morning newspaper in their pajamas - and nobody thinks anything of it.

The kind of neighborhood where fresh-grown vegetables just appear on the doorstep, and younger homeowners help older ones.

"I love my neighborhood, and my house," says Kryven, a slim 53-year-old who is the e-commerce manager for Goodwill in Berwyn.

After spending some time with Kryven, there's no doubt about her affection for either. Every other sentence is fondly peppered with the names of her neighbors: Penny, Ken, Kate, Heather, Steve, Rand, Linda.

It's Linda's mother's former house that she now occupies.

The small twin is not extraordinary when you consider other homes that have been featured in "Haven" - no amazing renovations, vistas, or history. But what the 100-year-old dwelling lacks in notability it makes up for in comfort.

It also reflects the quiet, sometimes quirky, sentiments of someone who restarted her life as a single woman about 10 years ago in this Chester County borough.

Kryven, a dog rescuer who grew up in Levittown, Bucks County, was renting an apartment down the street from her current home when she learned that Linda's mother was moving to a nursing facility. She called a contractor who was renovating the house and offered to buy it. He agreed.

It was perfect, Kryven says, because she was able to dictate what she wanted: granite countertops and oak cabinets in the kitchen, and a larger upstairs bathroom.

"That's what was so wonderful," Kryven says - being able to watch the yearlong renovation and talk about changes as they occurred. She had all the walls painted white because she likes bright, she says.

"While it was being redone, I'd peek in the window and see what was happening," she says.

One thing Kryven didn't touch were the doors. The ones original to the house are still there.

Her taste favors the eclectic. In the laundry area off the kitchen are a small hutch she bought in Massachusetts and a decades-old drop-leaf table. In the dining room are cloth-covered chairs and lilac curtains. A curio cabinet filled with plastic Santas stands in the small living room.

"It was the roly-poly one that got me started" collecting, Kryven says.

Near the curio is an old spool - the large kind used for industrial wire - and on top of it is a xylophone that Kryven keeps around for when she has young visitors.

Her house is filled with such purchases.

"I poke around on Craigslist and other Web sites," she says. "If it strikes my fancy, I buy it."

One such fancy: a little girl's dress, on a hanger, that now is suspended from a nail in the upstairs hallway.

In her bedroom is a cookie jar that holds her gloves: "I like things to look nice," she says, "but I like to have it do something."

Here and there are old aprons, the kind June Cleaver wore on Leave It to Beaver.

But Kryven's house also holds many mementos. Her grandmother's wedding dress hangs from the bathroom door. A pair of glasses she believes belonged to the same ancestor are on her bedroom dresser. A picture of that wedding dress is in the living room. (Her family hails from McAdoo, Pa., a little bit of a burg in Schuylkill County.)

Outside the house is where Kryven lives much of her life, though.

Her back yard, a speck of a thing, is filled with garden art and other kinds of tchotchkes, acquired in various ways. An old door hides the compost pile; a headboard and footboard stand relatively close together, with flowers growing around them, and little garden figures - rabbits, gnomes, an old-man sun - peeking out.

Bird feeders are visited by catbirds, cardinals, and song sparrows, Kryven says.

The front yard also is lovingly tended. Although the house is close to the street, Kryven has made good use of the available land. Butterfly bushes, mums, rhododendrons, Tennessee grass, and a beautyberry shrub with its bright fuchsia berries take up most of the space.

Kryven has converted a rescued rocker into a planter - her neighbor Penny gave her a potted plant to put into the broken seat. You can hear how grateful she is when she speaks Penny's name.

The neighbors are wonderful, Kryven says. If somebody is outside, it's typical for others to gather around.

When friends first visited the house, Kryven says, "they said, 'This is you.' "

She met most of her neighbors by walking, either to the train to get to work or to take her dog, Sunday, for a stroll. "A big part of it is walking Sunday. I'd say hi and chat with people."

And she has the perfect outdoor furniture for chatting. On her open front porch is a glider from her Levittown days.

Nothing fancy, mind you. But Phyllis Kryven wouldn't have it any other way.

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