Centenarian Dines & Kraft house shines on the most recent Lakewood Home Tour

The backhouse of Taylor Nicholson’s 100-plus-year-old home on Lakewood Boulevard may have once sheltered a World War II military tank.

The Unrefined Bakery cofounder points out that this is not verified, but it makes sense because the high ceilings in that 800-square-foot space are tall enough to be two stories.

“I don’t know why else it would have the high ceilings it has,” Nicholson says. “There’s really no rationale for it. So, maybe it’s true.”

Now, it houses a guest room and pool-adjacent bathroom, plus a space to project movies onto a screen, a Pop-A-Shot basketball hoop, and a weight room for her teen and preteen boys.

The pool is one reason why Nicholson and her family moved in 2020 to the two-story Dines & Kraft home, which was a home developer of many Lakewood homes in the ’20s and ’30s. This is her and her husband’s fourth house in our neighborhood as a couple.

“We’ve lived in old homes the whole time we’ve been in Lakewood, never one this old, but they have charm and character and originality and things that are not as easy to find in new builds,” Nicholson says. “New builds just really don’t appeal to me.”

Sure, her floors may be creakier than those in a new house, and there’s always something that needs to be worked on, but that’s true of any home, Nicholson says. She loves its original features – stained glass windows, iron railings on the curved staircase and the Rookwood-tiled fireplace.

One of Nicholson’s favorite rooms is her whimsical butler’s pantry and bar. It also has geometric stained glass windows coupled with jungle-oriented wallpaper with fancy animals — parrots with crowns, reptiles with top hats and stopwatches, and toucans with bow ties.

“The kind of wallpaper you could only put in a tiny space because it is bold and loud,” she says.

Nicholson and her husband had the home renovated before they moved in. She acted as the general contractor on the project and finished the project in about three and a half weeks with her subcontractors.

“We took it sort of to a blank slate in terms of the changes we wanted to make, refinishing the floors, smoothing the texture on the walls, painting everything,” Nicholson says, adding that most of the surfaces were changed out. “We added all recessed lighting. The house had nothing but floor lamps and one central light fixture in each room, so it was quite dark. … But we didn’t change any of the bones of the house. The structure and the layout is exactly as it was.”

As for interior design, Nicholson described her choices as classic. She uses neutral and natural tones with small bursts of color, such as statement pillows in her living room, art on display and wallpaper. When bolder hues are used, they highlight the colors in the original features.

“The home, it makes such a statement in and of itself, like the architecture, and we have all these arched doorways and the stained glass,” she says. “I didn’t want anything to compete with stained glass or the other character marks in the home.”

Nicholson’s home is situated within the Lakewood Conservation District, and she likes that. Of course, this means she would have to follow rules to make certain changes to her home. When she replaced windows, they had to be replicas of the ones that were already there.

“It just preserves the history we’re surrounded by,” Nicholson says. “All of my neighbors are obviously old homes as well. I love being in a conservation district. I think part of what makes Lakewood so unique, it’s not only just our trees and all of our awesome landscaping everywhere, but I love that our houses are protected.”