Great
Shaker
Homes
Not long ago, Evelyn and Dave Greene,
an energetic and industrious 60-something
couple, pondered the day both of them
would retire. Dave had already retired from
sales in the machine tools industry. Evelyn,
a market research analyst, has a few years
to go. But in thinking ahead, they wondered
what it would be like to leave Shaker
Heights and live in, say, Spain.
They decided the heck with it.
They’re staying put in their three-story
Fernway duplex, where they’ve been
since 1985 – a perfectly beautiful home
of a manageable size in a city they had
grown to love and participate in, being
long-time active members of the Friends
of the Shaker Library.
So instead of blowing six figures on a
Mediterranean fishing hut in Barcelona or
Tarragona, they used that money to make
the most of a small space, completely
gutting and reconfiguring one side of
their unusual two-family home over 10
months during 2012. They did most of
the time-consuming and difficult physical
labor themselves, but it was a labor of love
that has assured them of comfort and a
degree of elegance for their reclining years.
The home is unusual because it’s one of only a dozen or so duplexes in town that was built
side-by-side rather than under-and-over. It was designed, mock-Tudor, by Alfred A. Drescher,
who designed more than 100 homes in Shaker during the 1920s, and was built in 1928 – ’29.
One half of the duplex has an Ingleside Road address, the other faces Kenmore
Road. Given that there is just over 2,000 square feet of living space (on either side), the
A
Fernway duplex
gets a 10~month
DIY make~over
36 SHAKERONLINE.COM | SPRING 2014