Buying a house, building a development in the back yard

The call from his Realtor came late on a Thursday night in winter 2013, and at first it baffled Vaughan Buckley.

"She said, 'We're going to see this Victorian house tomorrow, and we're going to buy it,' " recalled Buckley, who started Vaughan Buckley Custom Homes in 2009. "I said, 'Jen, it's 11 o'clock. You know I don't buy houses. I'm a builder. I buy land.' "

But shortly after sunrise, Buckley and Jennifer Grosskopf of Coldwell Banker were in front of a towering Second Empire-style Victorian house in Roxborough. He didn't know it yet, but he was about to own both the house and a surrounding mini-neighborhood.

"We came here at 8. We made an offer by 9, and by lunchtime there were a dozen developers crawling all over it," he said.

But the owners liked the 27-year-old Australian, and for $680,000 - a huge price for an aging house in that part of Roxborough - he had a property oozing potential and problems.

The three-story structure on Leverington Avenue, from the mid-19th century, needed a good bit of work inside, but Buckley was confident that it could be turned into a showpiece home for him and his wife, Marie.

"We knew we wanted to live here and be part of the community," he said.

The problem was that it was on a 1.5-acre plot, the rest of it idle land that had served little purpose since it was used years before for grazing horses from a nearby barn.

Buckley's solution: Buy the house and build single-family houses on the land behind it. He had built a house nearby and fallen in love with the neighborhood. "I was there every day and was seeing it from the local perspective."

The neighbors and the Victorian's owners had been concerned about a developer coming in, tearing down the house, and putting in multifamily housing that would be out of character there. If the house had been demolished, a developer could have put in about 10 contemporary townhouses, Buckley said.

James Calamia, executive director of Roxborough Development Corp., said that has been happening frequently in the area, threatening the Victorian character of some traditional neighborhoods. Buckley's approach is "a creative way to use the land in a historically sensitive way," he said.

Buckley's stated intention of preserving the house had won over the owner. Still, he would need a zoning variance to build anything else on the property, and the neighbors' cooperation could be key.

"But it was my back yard, and that made a big difference to the neighbors," Buckley says. Most of them anyway. One told him, "I'll believe it when I see the moving trucks."

"I knew bulldozing people wasn't going to be the way to get it done," Buckley says. "I went to every neighborhood meeting for a year." He also joined the board of the development corporation.

The final plan calls for four two-story modular houses that combine Victorian and contemporary elements to blend in with Buckley's three-story dwelling. For example, each house will have a mansard roof and a metal roof over the porch.

Each house will be just under 3,000 square feet, with four bedrooms, 31/2 baths, and a finished basement. They are expected to sell at $550,000 to $650,000, with completion expected by year's end.

Buckley plans a small, undedicated street to reach the houses, designed to spare the large chestnut, oak and walnut trees on the property. He has bought adjacent land and may build there, too.

Inside the Victorian house, the biggest change was its conversion from a five-bedroom, two-bath layout to a more practical plan of four bedrooms and 31/2 baths. Buckley says he spent countless hours rewiring, stripping wallpaper, and adding features.

In the dining room, for example, a butcher-block table and radiator covers were made on site. In the large kitchen, he installed a coffered ceiling, with wood-defined boxes breaking up the space. Light fixtures and moldings were period-style, but there were no antiques.

"I must have spent hundreds of hours picking out things," he says. "Half of it was discontinued minutes after I bought it.

"The design work was painstaking. I don't ever want to go through it again. But I'm happy to be where we are now."