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Saturday, September 15, 2001

By Kevin Kirkland, Post-Gazette Homes Editor

Two couples -- one in their 20s and 30s and the other in their 40s -- took a chance on the North Side. You have only to look at their homes, featured on tomorrow's Mexican War Streets House & Garden Tour -- to believe their gamble has paid off.

	The living room of Barbara Talerico and Glenn Olcerst has a funky feel with an asymmetrical cobalt blue couch, space-age green coffee table and an abstract rug. (Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette Photos)

Glenn Olcerst and Barbara Talerico's row house, one of the first restored homes on Resaca Place, and Terry and Jorg Wiezorek's just-finished rehab on Buena Vista illustrate the wide range of possibilities in this North Side neighborhood.

Perhaps Olcerst took the biggest risk. He bought a four-story apartment building on West North Avenue in 1976 and this town house in 1984, when few other buildings had been restored and drugs and crime were still a problem here.

"I bought the two highest-priced properties in the neighborhood up to that time. I was committed to the neighborhood from the first. The neighborhood has caught up," Olcerst, 48, said, laughing.

A lawyer specializing in labor law and a professional photographer, the Bronx, N.Y., native wanted to live here mainly to avoid a long commute Downtown. When Olcerst moved in, the 1850s townhouse had been mostly renovated. When he and Talerico married 13 years later, it was clean, smooth, up-to-date -- and the consummate bachelor's pad.

"When Barbara moved in, there were three bikes in the living room," Olcerst admitted.

"Every window had blinds and they were always closed," Talerico, 47, added. "It was like a cave."

Shortly after she settled in, she asked her husband if he could install a single piece of stained glass in the recently unblinded window in the second floor bath. Olcerst, who has dabbled in stained glass for 30 years, didn't stop there. Instead, he uncovered a burst of creative energy that has since colored nearly every room in the house.

First, he designed, created and installed a panel of pink, purple and green confetti and hand-rolled glass for the bathroom. Its spidery lines mimic the shadows on an abstract photograph of Talerico that he shot in 1997; the photo and window now hang side by side.

Next, he began work on four downstairs windows. They now sparkle behind custom-designed assemblages of hand-cut and polished beveled glass, a few also containing chunks of Waterford crystal.

Then the decorating began. The couple, who Talerico says "sort of riff off each other" began their design collaboration in the living room. There, an asymmetrical cobalt blue couch is in tune with a space-age green coffee table and an abstract rug, creating a kind of funky contemporary feel.

The couple are not as enamored with the room as they once were, deriding its style as "Early Nightclub" and "Pee Wee's Playhouse." But they still admire the artwork by local artist Mary Culbertson Stark and the custom-made lacewood console and mirror by Lorna Secrest of Works of Wood in nearby Manchester. Secrest also created cubelike end tables from plum mahogany for the master bedroom.

	The 32nd annual Mexican War Streets Society House & Garden Tour Featuring: 15 homes, gardens and other points of interest. When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Tickets: Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 on the day of the tour, available at the corner of West North Avenue and Resaca Place, North Side.

The dining room reflects Olcerst's longtime love of Art Nouveau style. A reproduction light fixture from Classiques hangs over the tamarind wood dining room set he bought in Paris years ago. The furniture's sensuous curves inspired the intricate swirling design Olcerst carved from three shades of onyx for the fireplace surround.

His stone-cutting skills, which grew from his stained-glass work, were tested and enhanced when he carved another design in onyx for the front hall and ones in granite for the master bedroom and bath. Marc Anthony Construction built the bathroom and renovated the third floor.

For the kitchen, Olcerst found nearby craftspeople after his own heart to fashion the blue, yellow and green tile for the backsplash. Working from Olcerst's designs, Matt Grebner and Shari Bennett of Hunnell Street Tile & Works hand-carved tile molds that re-create the beveled edge of Olcerst's window patterns.

The couple has no idea how much money they have put into the house.

"We can't take it with us. It's imbedded in the house," Talerico said.

A Scott native, she can't believe how much she enjoys living in the city.

"It's a very close-knit, diverse neighborhood," she said.

The War Streets' neighborly feeling was a also drawing card for the Wiezoreks, who live several blocks away on Buena Vista.

	Three of the original nine fireplaces in the Wiezoreks' home were restored as gas burners. The marbelized slate mantels are original to either the house or the neighborhood.

"I tell people it takes me 60 minutes to walk Downtown -- 30 minutes to walk and 30 minutes to talk and catch up with the neighbors," said Terry, 29, who grew up in Churchill.

Their favorite part of this 1884 row house, which was a boarded-up wreck when they first looked at it in January 2000, was what they could see from its third-floor windows.

"You could see everything from the West End Bridge to the South Side Slopes," Terry said, not to mention the Downtown skyline and lots of the North Side. The couple immediately understood why the street's name, in Spanish, means "beautiful view."

The view was a lot less desirable inside the building, however. Vacant for 17 years, the brick home had suffered major water damage from a leaky roof. There were gaping holes in some of the walls and parts of the upper floors had collapsed into the basement, leaving a 6-foot-high pile of debris.

The building was still structurally sound, engineer friends reassured Jorg, 36, a native of Wolfsburg, Germany, and professor in the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Materials Science and Engineering. The place reminded him a bit of centuries-old homes in Europe, he said, but he still "had to come around."

In the end, the recently married couple was persuaded to make the leap into old home ownership by the look of surrounding restored homes and the track record of PHASE, the nonprofit community development group that owned this house. PHASE already had restored and sold nine other homes in the North Side.

Glenn Olcerst and Barbara Talerico will open the doors of their Mexican War Streets row house for Sunday's tour.

This row house was to be the first of three "shell rehabs," in which the exterior is faithfully restored but the interior is left gutted for the new owners to develop. The Wiezoreks were so impressed with PHASE's past work that they asked for its help on the interior, too.

After paying $30,000 for what Terry called "a ruin," the couple began to make the difficult choices on how they wanted to use the space. They kept the tall front windows, replacing only the bottom sashes on the first and second floors. They also preserved the 11 1/2-foot ceilings, nearly 9-foot doorways, a pair of pocket doors and any of the baseboard and other trim that could be saved. What couldn't be saved was almost perfectly reproduced with stock moldings.

Three of the original nine fireplaces were restored as gas burners and they reused marbelized slate mantels that are original to either the house or the neighborhood.

Despite such period elements, the house overall has a bright, contemporary feel. The couple had oak and ceramic tile floors installed throughout the first floor, including the modern kitchen, with unstained maple cabinets and green granite-like laminate counters. On the second floor, their scribbled designs over lattes resulted in a huge master bath, with a gleaming chrome, glass and tile shower stall and a large Jacuzzi tub surrounded by gray ceramic tile.

The couple, who say the reconstruction cost $175,000, enjoyed the challenge of marrying old and new; the home's decor strikes a balance between the two -- and their interests.

"We compromise," Jorg said. "Sometimes she gets her stuff and sometimes I get mine."

As a metallurgist, he likes to see metal in furniture, such as a poplar and steel bench from Weisshouse and two organic iron benches by John Walter of Iron Eden. Two stylized iron flowers also by Walter stand among the verbena, petunias and other flowers Terry planted in the small plot out front.

The other furniture is a combination of antique-store and auction finds, family heirlooms and IKEA bargains that Terry has improved upon. On the white, unpapered walls, old family and childhood portraits hang amid black-and-white photos taken at their wedding at Phipps Conservatory. African soapstone carvings line a slate mantel that has Indian and Turkish ironware clustered at its base.

Terry sees the tour as a chance to make their home an advertisement.

"We want people to see that this all stemmed from a house that was going to be torn down," she said.

"Yes, it can be done and you don't have to be independently wealthy or an architect."