Sacramento Historic Home Tour to exhibit unique Capitol Mansions area to public

The owners of six century-old homes in midtown are preparing for hundreds of strangers to roam their halls during an open showcase next weekend.

Preservation Sacramento, an organization dedicated to maintaining the importance of historic buildings and homes, will host its 43rd Annual Historic Home Tour on Sunday, Sept. 16. The tour will feature the neighborhood of Capitol Mansions in midtown Sacramento, located between 22nd and 27th streets, near Capitol Avenue.

The tour is an open-house style, self-guided, walking tour which leads guests through some of Sacramento’s oldest standing houses; most built in the early 1900s.

Luis Sumpter, Preservation Sacramento Annual Home Tour chair, said a small research team delved into each home’s history to collect detailed information including past owners, unique facts and the home’s lifespan and significance in Sacramento history.

“It’s that fantasy of returning back to something that’s sort of nostalgic for people,” Sumpter said.

While the event is meant to give homeowners the opportunity to open their doors to the curious general public, some residents continue to discover new details about their own households.

Lauren Lajoie, a Capitol Mansions resident and retired federal worker, has retinitis pigmentosa, a rare degenerative eye disease which has left her with less than 5 percent of her vision.

Even with her impaired eyesight, Lajoie said she immediately ended her search for a new home two years ago after walking with her Realtor through the threshold of her current home.

Lajoie said she knew the home, built in 1906, was the right one for her from “the smell, sound and warmth” that she felt.

Lajoie’s home is one stop on the tour’s route this year and features walls covered in mid-century and modern wallpapers, a staircase with intricate, nautical-themed wood details and, her favorite feature, a large, curved glass window in her front room where she can sit and listen as people pass by on the sidewalk.

After two years of living in Capitol Mansions, Lajoie still discovers new details about her home, she said, including the beveled and textured pieces of an original stained glass fixture set in her entryway, which she observed only when a friend introduced her hands to the touch of it six weeks ago.

A few blocks up Capitol Avenue lives one of Lajoie’s good friends Sue Mortensen, whose home is also a part of the tour. A Sacramento native, Sue lived in San Francisco until about three years ago when she saw the deteriorating, characterful midtown homes of Sacramento and decided to commit to buying one and restoring it back to its original intentions: a family’s home.

Mortensen had a clear goal to repurpose, reuse and recycle as many pieces of original material as she could to keep true to the integrity of the home’s charm, including the “miles of wood,” many of the original floorboards, sinks and large, wavy glass windows in the front room.

Some of the original hardware from Mortensen’s home now double as art pieces, including a bathtub dating back to the first owners transformed by a local artist commissioned by Mortensen to display in the backyard.

“When you buy a house like this, you’re not just buying a house; you’re buying all the history that comes out of the walls here. You buy the stories that come with it,” Mortensen said.

“This house survived over 110 years because it kept adapting to change.”

As vice president of the local neighborhood association Friends of Capitol Mansions, Mortensen said it is important to salvage a sense of community and “smart growth” in Sacramento through advocacy.

“I have a not-so-secret personal mission that my community can become for Sacramento what Alamo Square is for San Francisco,” Mortensen said. “That our preservation effort is so strong and so effective that the value of this becomes very clear and we begin to get lots of support.”

Mortensen hopes the city, along with local neighborhood programs, can navigate through the growing shortage of living spaces and need for housing developments in Sacramento while maintaining the preservation of historic homes and landmarks.

Friends of Capitol Mansions formed when the neighborhood received a notice that there was a development project planned for the lot directly next door to Mortensen’s home, she said.

“The [developer] had planned this huge, monstrous thing: Raise the house up, make it a duplex, put two units in the back… and basically leave about 20 square feet of vacant property between us, and [the neighborhood] just got together and we fought it,” Mortensen said.

The members of the community voiced their concerns to the city about developing and building on historic landmarks in their area.

“The dust that we kicked up was so great,” Mortensen said. “It brought a lot of attention to the fact that the city had failed in its legal duty to put into place specific guidelines for development in noted historic districts.”

The city of Sacramento, along with Friends of Capitol Mansions, will unveil new “Historic Neighborhood” street sign toppers to recognize the area’s importance within the community and to help kick off the event.

The toppers will be placed throughout the district’s 24 blocks spanning from Kayak Alley to the north, Matsui Alley to the south, 22nd Street to the west and 27th Street to the east.

The event will also feature turn-of-the-century cars parked outside each of the showcased homes to illustrate what the streets may have looked and felt like when the homes were built.

According to Preservation Sacramento, this year’s tour features several distinct styles of Sacramento architecture including Colonial Revival, Queen Anne, Prairie Bungalow, and Classical Four-Square.

Sumpter says the event caters to, “anyone who’s interested in historic preservation ... and touring old properties,” or anyone, “who wants to see inside some really cool homes.”

If you go

Preservation Sacramento 43rd Annual Historic Home Tour

When: Sunday, Sept. 16, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Where: Preservation Sacramento ticket booth at the northwest corner of 22nd street and Capitol Avenue. Limited parking at 21st and Capitol Avenue garage.

Cost: $30 online at preservationsacramento.org or $35 at ticket booth on day of the event.