Thomas MacMillan Photo
Christmann inside “Chetstone.”
It has four working gas lamps, a hand-operated elevator, stained glass windows, carved chandeliers, and 140 years of history. All that’s missing is a group of artists to move in and give this ancient mansion a second life.
Ian Christmann, the photographer who owns the 1875 mansion at 154 East Grand Ave., has reached what may be the last phase of his quest to revive the old home, dubbed Chetstone.
Christmann has teamed up with the Grove co-working organization on Orange Street to try to launch Grove Studios at Chetstone.
At the Grove’s downtown space, freelancers and small organizations have a place to work together, to get out of their home offices and work alongside other people. Christmann and the Grove’s Slate Ballard envision a similar operation at Chetstone, but for artists and musicians and writers.
Christmann, who lives with his wife and two small children nearby on Quinnipiac Avenue, wants to turn the unoccupied Victorian Gothic house into shared studio space. Think Erector Square, except it’s a historic mansion with exquisite woodwork, not faded old factory made of bricks and steel.
Christmann, who’s 35, said he has about a month to fulfill his dream. He and his wife can’t afford to pay the mortgage on their own. They need to find some artists to rent studio space in the house — immediately.
Since he bought the house in 2003, Christmann has dreamed of filling it with artists.
He and his wife had been looking for a house to invest in, when she happened to be running by the mansion as a for-sale sign was going up. The couple began to investigate the possibility.
The house was owned at that time by Gordana Lam, an elderly widow who’d lived there for 40 years. She was moving into a nursing home and sold the house to the Christmanns for $222,000.
“As soon as we closed on it, it felt like, ‘This is such a cool house, it’s not really an investment,’” Christmann said. He realized the house was something special, not simply a property to flip.
The Christmanns decided to try to create an artist community with the house as its new home. The first order of business was to deal with all of Lam’s stuff. The woman who owned it had no next of kin and had sold the house with most of her worldly possessions still inside it — 40 years of memories.
“It was fully loaded,” Christmann said. The house was filled with furniture and personal belongings. Before she moved out, Lam (pictured) “had started to turn inward; everything was closed in,” Christmann said. The front yard was completely overgrown; the house wasn’t visible from the street. Inside, the curtains were drawn and pinned with safety pins that had rusted over.
In Lam’s husband’s old office, it was clear she had simply shut the door after he died in the ‘80s. Christmann found the man’s pipe still sitting on his desk as though he’d just gotten up.
One blessing of Lam’s apparently reclusive lifestyle was that she “never opened her door to the formica people in the ‘70s,” Christmann said. The house still has all original hardwood floors, with inlaid designs, along with countless other architectural details — carved moulding around all the doors and windows, stained glass, painted chandeliers, several working gas lamps.
As Christmann dug into the history of the house, he discovered more and more. The house was built in 1875 by Lucius Moody and his wife Dr. Mary Blair Moody, the first female physician in New Haven. It was one of four Victorian mansions at the top of the hill. At the time, the house looked down on farmland around the Quinnipiac River, commanding from it’s fourth-story tower what was likely one of the best residential views in the city (pictured).
The house changed hands only three times before he and his wife bought it, Christmann said. In the ‘20s, it was owned by an art collector named Albert Haasis, who dubbed the property “Chetstone.”
After the Christmanns bought the house, Home and Garden TV came and did a show about some of what they found inside: several old guns and a lot of paintings. They also ended up with some beautiful old furniture, including a grand piano.
In the attic, they found an old Zenith television with a circular screen …
… old copies of The New York Times from famous dates in history …
… and ringing the ceiling — hand-painted images of a gentleman rabbit.
Christmann, who grew up building houses with his carpenter father, dove into restoration work, including fixing leaks in the original slate roof. He worked from a rock-climbing harness roped to the chimney. The Christmanns cut down the overgrowth around the house and painted it inside and out.
Christmann found some artist tenants to move in: a photographer and five musicians, including Jonny Rodgers and Chuck Costa, the state troubadour. But they all moved out in November 2012, leaving Christmann with his artist-community dream still unfulfilled.
He’s teamed up with Ballard, one of the founders of the Grove, to now try a different tack: Not a live-in artist community, but shared artist studio space. Christmann said he envisions a creative space for writers, photographers, filmmakers, and musicians. Messier artists like painters and sculptors might work there, but Christmann said he’s mindful that the Chetstone is a more delicate environment than studio-space buildings in former factories like Erector Square.
The rates are also more expensive than Erector Square’s. “Membership” goes for $350 a month for a shared studio to $525 to $675 for a private room. Day rentals are also available. Christmann uses the house for portrait work.
Just maintaining a 140-year-old mansion is an expensive proposition. The house is heated by an oil-fueled steam boiler. “You can almost watch the tank drain when you fire it up,” Christmann said.
Christmann said he wants to tap into the Grove membership to find artists for Chetstone. “Lots of artists come into the Grove looking for space to create,” said Ballard.
Whether those artists will take root at Grove Studios at Chetstone remains to be seen. Christmann said he’s not sure what he’ll do if the studio plan doesn’t work out.
“We want to see it come to life,” he said of the old house.
