Doug Childers/Homes Correspondent
When Nathan “Nate” Bick and Ingrid Keller decided earlier this year to buy the Marburg property in Richmond’s Carillon neighborhood, they had no idea how close it had come to demolition. They were simply looking for an attractive property.
“When we lived in the Fan District, Nate used to jog by the house, and he loved it,” Keller said.
Marburg, a 3,261-square-foot Victorian house with four bedrooms, two full baths and two half-baths, is located near the intersection of Rugby Road and Bute Lane.
Bick and Keller weren’t just shopping for a new home for their family, though. They were also looking for a space where they could host musical performances. The couple had met while studying music at Indiana University, and they had hosted small events in their previous homes.
“It’s what we love the most about making music,” Bick said.
Keller is a concert pianist and faculty member at the University of Richmond, and Bick is senior major gift officer in Virginia Commonwealth University’s MedHealth development office.
“We walked into this house and said, this would be the perfect place for concerts,” Keller said. “We knew immediately where the piano should go.”
Bick and Keller were en route to buy the piano when their real estate agent called to say Marburg’s seller had accepted their offer. Only then did the couple discover the abandoned plans to raze the house, Keller says.
The neighborhood’s oldest residence
If you stand in front of Marburg today, it’s hard to imagine it faced demolition just eight years ago. The meticulously renovated house, which has stylistic elements of vernacular Queen Anne and Colonial Revival, commands attention.
And it has for 132 years.
Charles Euker, a German immigrant and Civil War veteran who owned a saloon and billiards parlor at 10th and Main streets, built the house in 1889.
At the time, the house stood virtually alone among expansive farmland. Its nearest neighbor, the Maymont mansion, wasn’t completed until 1893, making Marburg – which Euker named after his hometown – the oldest surviving residence in the Carillon neighborhood.
The 489-square-foot, two-room cottage in Marburg’s backyard is even older. It dates back to 1850 and was originally used by tenant farmers who worked on the land when it was part of the Beechwood Farm, says Beth O’Leary, former associate curator of American art for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and a Carillon resident who has done extensive research on the neighborhood.
Marburg’s kitchen, which was originally a freestanding smokehouse, also dates to 1850. Together, they’re the neighborhood’s oldest surviving structures, O’Leary says.
Euker and his family lived in Marburg until 1899. (When Euker’s daughter got married in the house in 1897, the Richmond Dispatch described the property as a “delightful suburban home.”)
From 1904 until his death in 1907, Euker served as commandant of the R.E. Lee Camp Confederate Soldiers’ Home, now the site of the VMFA.
Facing a wrecking ball
Marburg’s long history didn’t save it from demolition plans.
By 2013, the property had fallen into disrepair, and after it languished on the market for six months, a pair of local developers bought it with plans to tear down the house and build six homes on the site.
William “Bill” Lipps had also put in an offer on the house, and he wasn’t willing to give up.
“I love old houses, and Marburg’s almost a duplicate of my great-grandmother’s house,” Lipps said.
And despite appearances, the house was structurally sound.
So with the help of a couple friends and Historic Richmond, Lipps launched a campaign to save Marburg and eventually brokered a deal to buy it and a 1/3-acre piece of its original 1½-acre lot. In turn, the developers reduced the number of new houses they planned to build from six to four.
“Bill saved that house,” said Betsy Dotterer, a real estate agent with Joyner Fine Properties and Lipps’ agent in the negotiations. “He definitely had a vision, and he made me realize the possibilities and the grandeur that the home once held.”
