A Kitchen That Having to cook in a kitchen that has seen better days can be drudgery. Joe Hess can attest to that, as his galleystyle kitchen dated to the 1950s. “There was no way to glamorize it with words like ‘vintage’ or ‘mid-century,’” he says. “It was just plain awful.”
Five years ago,
Joe and his now-husband, Darryl Coble, were in search of a new home. “We had been looking for a year,” he recalls. Their realtor, Nathan Mountain, steered them in the direction of a short-sale house in the Centerville area. He warned them that it needed work. “He wasn’t kidding,” Joe says. “It looked like it hadn’t received any love in quite a while. Plus, it had been sitting empty for over a year.” When it was built in 1955, no doubt the house was representative of
the building boom that was creating Lancaster’s suburban neighborhoods. It also conveyed a new age of living as it offered such modern amenities as a onefloor design, a carport, cement floors, radiant heating and a large lot. Despite its problems, Joe fell in love with the sad-looking house. “I knew we could fix it,” he says, alluding to the evidence of neglect and DIY “remodeling” projects. The first item on the to-do list was to provide the house with a proper front door. By the spring of 2018, the two had
