Time KEEPERS

BY TIM GILMORE PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANDREW VARNES

Lori Boyer has called this house home for 35 years. She’s mourned a husband and married another here, and raised blended families. Along the way, she’s added about 3,500 square feet to the original 5,500 square foot dwelling. Now she and her husband, retired Circuit Judge Tyrie Boyer, are downsizing, though they’re not going far.

“We used to fill this house up,” Boyer says, “when the kids were growing up, when we threw holiday parties. Now the kids are grown and it’s an awfully big house just for the two of us. It’s time for another family to fill it up again.”

It’s an authoritative house, its red clay roof tiles, long white stucco wings spanning out from the central two stories, looking out behind long white walls along River Road, with a commanding view of the river. You might assume that of San Marco’s three Swisher mansions, this was the patriarch’s, when in fact, John Swisher built this Mediterranean Revival-style house, at 2234 River Road, for his son Carl and the complementary house next door at 2252 for himself.

When Swisher and Son, which became Swisher International in 1992, moved to Jacksonville in 1924, manufacturing its King Edward cigars, soon to become the most popular cigars in the world, John sought out the site of the grand old Villa Alexandria in the new Mediterranean-style development of San Marco.

John and his brother Harry had inherited the company from their father who’d started it in 1861. John bought Harry out in 1913 and Swisher Brothers became Swisher and Son. Both houses went up in 1929, just after the Florida Land Boom had ended and as the

Great Depression began. Swisher chose architects Marsh and Saxelbye, who also built Jacksonville’s grandest Mediterraneanstyle structures, Epping Forest and the San Jose Hotel, now Bolles Hall, in the ’20s. Carl Swisher left this house for the house his father built for himself when the latter died in 1944.

Lori and Ron Nemeyer, a real estate developer from Connecticut, had lived in Avondale and eyed the house for quite some time before Lori decided to commit to it in 1987. Though she wanted to make a house her own, it offered design details that weren’t up for negotiation. She points to the original mosaic tiles facing out from the sinuous front stucco staircase with its original wrought iron banister. “Whoever lives in this house has to appreciate its history,” she says.

The massive exposed beams, large fireplace and arched windows of the living room make that case. The loggia behind it, however, with its fountain, original coquina floor and arches with iron gates framing the river, was added by the Nemeyers to replace a sun room.

Ron Nemeyer died of leukemia in 1993, leaving Lori to raise her children R.J. and Quinn and run her late husband’s real estate investment and management companies, which owned property from Florida to Massachusetts. In 1997, she married Boyer, judge and son of a judge, who had two daughters. Tyrie thinks of the family room, on the other side of the kitchen, also as the library, with its first editions of Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa and books about African big game hunting. The subject serves fittingly for a transition to the next room.

The game room mirrors the living room on the other side of the foyer, but it’s an addition. Its massive oak beams once served in an historic warehouse, now demolished, on industrial Talleyrand Avenue. With the house for sale, half the purpose of the game room has moved into storage.

It was the room where the family played games and where Tyrie displayed his big game hunting trophies. The pool table remains, but the niches on either side of the fireplace, each painted with rocky landscapes, no longer feature the mountain sheep the Boyers stuffed as trophies. Gone from throughout the house are the leopard and zebra skins, elephant hides, antelope and warthog heads that until recently proliferated.

In the courtyard that leads to the greenhouse, the bright tiles of the fountain, central blues and surrounding yellows and greens, came from an upstairs bathroom the Boyers dismantled. In the herb garden grows an olive tree, rosemary, sage and thyme. An iron plate above the door of the greenhouse says, “Built by Lord and Burnham Co., Irvington, N.Y.C.” Original mechanical wheels and pulley chains open and close glass roof panels and windows from inside.

Tyrie says that somewhere between Lori’s tenure as City Council president and CEO of the Downtown Investment Authority, she used to grow a glorious rose garden nearby.

If the greenhouse doesn’t sell the Swisher estate to its next buyer, the sight of sunset over the St. Johns, behind the stately old oak and original swimming pool, as seen from the master bedroom might do it. Besides sunsets, Lori has loved “watching the storms come out of the West. You can watch them coming.”

The Boyers will miss the house, but they’re not planning to go far. They own the smaller lot immediately to the north, where they say Villa Alexandria once stood, and where they plan to build a smaller home. All three Swisher houses stand on the former Villa Alexandria estate.

The socialite Martha Mitchell named her 140-acre estate for her husband Alexander in the 1870s. While Alexander Mitchell, a railroad magnate and banker, stayed in Milwaukee, Martha filled the house with European art, hired 50 servants, and had 95 varieties of roses planted. Her garden parties became famous, including an 1876 gathering that brought 500 guests across the river aboard two steamships.

While the house can seem magisterial, and big personalities have called this place home, Lori seems humbled by having had the chance to live and raise a family here. “You’re a period in the history of the house,” she says, “but that’s all you are. It’s your home, but it’s not your house.” u