Midtown home tour features well-known Wichita home, two others on Park Place
For its comeback year, the Historic Midtown Citizens Association’s home tour will feature a well-known Wichita home and two others on Park Place that have been updated since Wichitans and others last saw them during past home tours.
The HMCA’s historic home tours started in 1974 as a way to showcase the homes of some of Wichita’s early and most prosperous residents, plus raise money for various association projects, including a college scholarship for a Midtown resident. The last tour, in 2017, primarily featured homes built by William H. Sternberg, a prolific builder during Wichita’s early economic boom who also built the Sedgwick County Courthouse. Period-dressed volunteer docents and often the homeowners themselves are on hand during the tours to share historical tidbits or point out interesting features.
This year’s tour focuses on three homes on Park Place, described in a 1977 Wichita Beacon article as “once … the center of Wichita’s most fashionable area.”
The homes still remain pretty grand in the eyes of their homeowners, and tour-goers will have an opportunity to see why.
Visitors will be able to observe the careful period restoration work carried out at 1720 Park Place by Sam and Sarah Sackett, the return to Victorian décor at the landmark 1751 Park Place by June and Ralph Rhodes, and the happy, colorful spaces created by Roxanne Kellogg at 1759 Park Place.
In terms of history, 1720 Park Place was built around 1910 at a cost of $18,000, according to an early newspaper article, by Charles Darrigrand, superintendent at the Dold’s packing plant. It’s an example of the American Foursquare, a post-Victorian multi-storied home with a sort of boxy shape, hipped roof, large windows (this home has 50), and wide porch.
The home at 1751 Park Place, which has been called Wey Mansion and now renamed The Sweet Magnolia Wey Manor by its current homeowners, was built by Herman and Josephine Wey in 1909 and originally cost about $20,000. Wey was a wealthy hardware merchant who operated hardware and implement stores in Kansas and Oklahoma. The home is a Queen Anne style with Baroque, Victorian and Romanesque styling.
The home at 1759 Park Place is the oldest on the tour, dating to around 1904. It was originally built by William Chain, a bookkeeper, and is in more of an Arts and Craft style, said Kellogg, who’s lived in the home for the past three decades.
For all of the current homeowners, it was the potential of what these homes could be in their care that drew them to the properties.
“We went through and we were like kids in a candy shop,” recalled Sarah Sackett on seeing the home for the first time in December 2007 with her sister, who was living in Midtown at the time. “Look, there’s a sliding door. There’s a laundry chute. There’s a third floor.”
The home had been on the market for months, likely because it didn’t have central air or a garage and had only 1 ½ baths, Sackett said. After moving in in 2008, the Sacketts were quickly asked to participate in the 2009 HMCA home tour.
“The house was very much in process” during that previous home tour, with stripped walls and little furniture placed in the rooms, Sarah Sackett said,
Since then, the home has benefited from Sam Sackett’s woodworking skills and the couple’s enthusiasm to restore and upgrade many of its features. The couple installed a ground source, or geothermal, heat pump in the backyard, which provides an efficient, renewable heating and cooling system using the home’s original ductwork. Floors and trim were stripped and refinished, and new storm windows hung.
The couple is currently in the process of renovating the kitchen. The Sacketts stripped down layers of linoleum and one layer of tar paper to reveal the home’s only maple hardwood floor. (All of the home’s other floors are made of oak, except the pine floor in the third-floor ballroom.) Sam Sackett is building pine cabinets to match those found in the butler’s pantry, having purchased period-correct pinewood from a Virginia supplier.
A new countertop in the kitchen with an east-facing window where she can sit in the morning sun and look into the backyard is now a favorite space for Sarah Sackett. So they could enjoy their backyard more while staying home during the summer of 2020, the family had done several improvements to what Sarah considered an unfinished outdoor room.
One thing the Sacketts left circa 1910 is the original wallpaper that still hangs in the dining room; it’s a dark brown with a painted design. In the fall and winter, when the tree outside is stripped of its leaves, the room’s leaded decorative windows cast prisms in not only the dining room but nearby rooms as well.
“That was my favorite room when we looked at it,” Sarah Sackett said. “My other favorite was the third floor.”
Kellogg, the owner of 1759 Park Place, was already living in the Midtown neighborhood, just one street over on Fairview, when she saw the for-sale sign go up about 30 years ago.
“It was not in very good shape, half-done and full of crap and I looked beyond that and saw I could fix it up. It was a blank slate that I could play with.”
She now calls it her “paradise.”
When Kellogg moved in, the house was set up as two residences, a holdover from when two sisters lived separately — one on the first floor, the other on the second. The second-floor kitchen was turned into a nursery by Kellogg early on.
Since being on a home tour about 10 years ago, Kellogg has renovated the second-floor sleeping porch and repurposed three of the four second-floor bedrooms. One serves as a music room for when her boyfriend visits and plays guitar and she sings along. The kitchen-turned-nursery-turned-bedroom is now her craft room. A third bedroom has been converted into what Kellogg calls her bohemian retreat where she does yoga.
Kellogg’s favorite feature is the home’s huge wraparound porch. This past summer she redid the porch and painted the floor in her favorite color, purple, making it stand out among the home’s white exterior.
“It’s delightful to have my morning coffee there,” said Kellogg. She also loves sitting on the porch during rainstorms.
While Kellogg saw a blank slate when she purchased her home, June and Ralph Rhodes saw a bland slate when they toured 1751 Park Place. It’s one of Wichita’s more well-known homes with its three stories, a grand porch and second-story balcony and Corinthian pillars. A two-story carriage house sits in the back; the carriage house will be closed during the tour since that’s where the Rhodeses three dogs will hang out while visitors tour the main house.
“We left Dallas for this home,” June Rhodes said. “It had been my lifetime dream to get a Queen Anne if I was lucky.” The couple purchased the home in early 2020.
While the home wasn’t in need of major renovations, the neutral color palette throughout the house was not period correct.
“We have been taking it back,” June Rhodes said about the major transformation the couple has made to the home’s interior. A November 2020 Wichita Eagle story detailed much of the work the Rhodeses have done. June Rhodes has created a Facebook page for the home, where she often posts about work the couple continues to do.
“We have taken this house to a point where we feel like if somebody lived in 1909 and walked in right now, they would think that they had gone back in time. … We’ve taken it back to its roots,” June Rhodes said in the article.
The home retains all of its original woodwork, a grand entry with a dramatic wooden staircase, four parlors, four fireplaces with original tile work, a third-floor ballroom and many other features.
June Rhodes said she’s been very conscious to honor the home’s history, even researching and finding wallpaper the same pattern as what had originally been installed in the home. They even replaced all the modern flip light switches with period push-button switches.
“It’s an experience when you walk into it. It always is for me.”
She’s befriended one of the Weys’ great-grandchildren and has received several items and ephemera from the relative. Several of those pieces are displayed on the wall in one of the parlors. The blueprints of the home are displayed in the ballroom.
The home has been on several previous Midtown tours.
Historic Midtown homes tour on Park Place
What: A home tour, started in 1974, organized by the Historic Midtown Citizens Association to benefit neighborhood projects and a scholarship for a Midtown resident
Where: 1720 Park Place, 1751 Park Place and 1759 Park Place
When: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 9, and 1-5 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 10
Tickets: $15 for ages 13 and older, free for accompanying children ages 12 and under; available at KANSEL, 1650 N. Fairview, during tour hours. Ticket sales will end at 4:30 p.m. Oct. 9 and 4 p.m. Oct. 10.
More information: facebook.com/Historic-Midtown-Citizens-Association-386551698028540