Rebecca and John Lane were avid fans of “This Old House” and looking for a new project when they first laid eyes on this 1905 Neoclassical Victorian.  The San Jose house with its Roman-style round columns and dentil moldings was in nearly original condition, but needed a lot of work. With the help of architectural designer Lynn Miller in 2007, they took the house down to the studs and began a four-year project that included every weekend of do-it-yourself projects, from refinishing floors to stripping and replacing moldings throughout the house. They tore out a carport and built a detached garage, with John custom-making seven types of molding to match the house. They graciously opened the home for the Rose Garden Homes Tour this fall.

Along the way, John, a mentor in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, taught teenager Devon Hunter the art of carpentry (and the fun of demolition.)

“He’s practically a member of the family at this point,” said John, who began mentoring 19-year-old Devon when he was just seven.

The Lanes left the front rooms in their original configuration, but opened up the back of the house, extending a breakfast nook onto an old porch area, and converting two bedrooms into a family room and stairwell. By excavating nearly two feet of dirt from under the basement, they turned the low-ceilinged space with exposed pipes into a complete living area with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, a wine cellar and a “secret door.” The couple was surprised to find that a trap door that led them to the attic revealed 10-foot ceilings above. Adding extra dormers, this became their master suite. Rebecca found vintage-style corbels to use as shelf supports for the luxurious closet. They shopped at antique shops for vintage light fixtures and recovered stained glass windows from John’s parents’ attic in Portland to use as transom windows in the kitchen.

They named the house “Villa Roseto,” Italian for “Rose Garden Estate.”

“It was a much bigger deal than we originally anticipated,” John said of the project. But the 4,000 square foot result, he said, is worth it.

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When Gretchen and Dominic Kotab first saw this 1930 Spanish-style home in San Jose, they thought it would be perfect for their growing family. The living room with its 15-foot ceilings and exposed rustic wood beams was ideal for their piano — along with all the lessons for their children to come.

“It just had a lot of charm,” Gretchen said, including original hardwood floors throughout.

 The kitchen faced the back of the house, so Gretchen could keep an eye on the kids in the backyard. The house was already graciously proportioned, with four bedrooms and three baths. But the kitchen and bathrooms hadn’t been touched in decades. The family lived in the house for five years before moving out for a substantial remodel when their oldest entered kindergarten at St. Martin’s.

“It was chaos,” Gretchen said.

Her favorite part of the project was a trip to Los Angeles to Mission Tile West, where she chose gorgeous, vintage-inspired tile for the kitchen and baths. The kitchen backsplash is especially fabulous, with a cream and green interlocking pattern. Their master bath is small, but Gretchen wanted to make it elegant, choosing Carrera marble. They expanded the front and back patios, covering the front with Spanish tile and the back with slate. With the children ages 3, 5 and 7 now, the house is just right.

They opened their doors this fall for the Rose Garden Homes Tour. Floral Designer Jose Ibarra worked his magic in nearly every room, from the dining room table and sideboard, to the branches on the living room mantle, to the front courtyard. A master at work!

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This house has been ahead of its time since it was built in 1950. Unlike most ranch houses of its era, it had a family room connected to the kitchen and walls of glass looking out to the back garden. For the past 34 years, it has been carefully maintained, updated and adorned by the current homeowners. The house had great bones to start, including gracious formal living and dining rooms and a burgundy and pink tiled central bathroom that remains in mint condition. (Take a look at the antiqued mirror-fronted bathroom cabinets. Original and glamorous!)

The homeowners opened their doors to the Rose Garden Homes Tour this fall.

One of the homeowners, a retired schoolteacher, is the artisan of the duo and took his talents to add color, texture and craftsmanship to the kitchen and bathrooms especially. An expert is paint finishes and detailed woodworking, he has transformed walls and cabinets. Peek at his detail work, including the Venetian plaster ceiling in the bathroom off the laundry room. Ask a docent to open the secret spice racks he built into the stove hood and the curved drawers for silverware in the island. The rear bathroom is another masterpiece, where he engineered a swinging bedroom door that doubles as a bathroom closet door. (When the bedroom door is open, the door then closes the bathroom closet. And notice the woodwork on the door he matched with the cabinetry.) He also fashioned a medicine cabinet using an oil painting, instead of a mirror, on the facade. The couple have collected antiques at shops and auction houses around the Bay Area, and also cherish their two Lalique statues, one of fish in the living room, and another of cats in the dining room.

This house, built for the Zolezzi family more than a half century ago, remains in pristine condition today.

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In the 10 months it took to build this house from the ground up, a lot happened in the Wetmore family. Diane’s mother, the matriarch of the family, died, and her daughter got married. What she realized then was just how important it was that this new home become the center, the gathering place, for the family.

And to Diane and Ray, whose four grown daughters all attended St. Martin of Tours, that meant big, open spaces for entertaining, both inside and out. And that starts at the majestic front door, a work of iron art with wavy glass windows that open behind it, letting the California breeze blow from the front all the way to the glass doors that slide into the wall in the back. The family graciously opened their home for the Rose Garden Homes Tour this fall.

Ray is a commercial masonry contractor and the home that Diane describes as part Arizona, part Florida and part Hawaii needed some signature stonework. With the help of architect Chris Spaulding and designer Susan Powell, they created a stone alcove that can be glimpsed from the entryway as well as a stone-covered stove hood. Even the risers on the curving staircase are covered in a distinctive tile to add interest. The living room ceiling soars two-stories high, with windows upon windows to let light in. The front room was designed as a “mancave” with leather sofas, a wet bar, stone fireplace and vintage wine barrels. Limestone tile floors make a seamless transition from the living room through the wall of windows(that disappear when opened) to the covered patio, complete with a Tuscan-style dining table and plans for a full-service barbecue area.

With a gracious master bedroom downstairs, the upstairs is reserved for family, including a nursery for the Wetmore’s grandchildren.

“Everyone comes here and stays here,” Diane said. “It was built to bring the family together.”

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But when the road narrows and the oaks make way for redwoods, you reach the old gate at San Clemente Rancho, a private enclave dating back half a century. What the 1960s-era cabins here lack in square footage, they make up for in vintage charm and, in some cases, high style.

Folks from San Francisco to Salinas have discovered this special place and brought their own sense of style – from modern organic to rustic to Americana – to these little abodes. And at nearly every one, you’ll find deck railings covered with beach towels and walking sticks for hikes and buckets at back doors for catching bullfrogs at the lake.

Three cabin owners opened their doors for a peek into how they made the most of their small spaces by combining a respect for the past with their own family heirlooms and contemporary touches.

The look: Modern organic

Kathi Fanelli-Mann, a Bay Area interior designer, shares her one-bedroom, 600-square-foot cabin with her husband, playwright Michael Norman Mann, and their two sons.

Their large Hollister home is filled with vivid colors – but not their tiny cabin at the rancho.

“I wanted to keep it peaceful in here with the color scheme,” she said. The existing whitewashed redwood walls drove the theme and texture. From the bedroom on one side, through the kitchen, she covered the floor with a neutral seagrass – a forgiving flooring that hides the tracked-in dirt and dries quickly when the boys leave their wet bathing suits behind. The chairs are covered in linen, the windows in canvas. A block of wood serves as an end table. Fern leaves picked from the property and propped in oversize jars provide the organic color that brings in the outdoors.

The most stunning focal point is reserved for the bedroom – a huge photo-on-canvas of a snow-covered Yellowstone bison that Mann took on vacation. But this lone bedroom is no master bedroom. Indeed, the Manns gave it up for their boys and flanked the buffalo with a pair of twin beds. A mirrored cabinet from Ikea provides storage and adds visual space – and a bit of sparkle – to the room. A jar next to one of the beds keeps a collection of wild turkey and quail feathers the boys gathered on the property.

An added benefit of giving the children the bedroom? Close the door and hide the mess.

The couple sleeps in the living room, in a sleek daybed with decorative pillows that doubles as a lounge space.

The real magic is outdoors, where an old patio lined by a low stone wall nestles into a grove of live oaks and a new deck overlooks a fish pond, Mann’s favorite place to write.

“In the evenings,” Fanelli-Mann said, “we sit outside, wrap ourselves in blankets and watch the bats come out.”

The look: Americana

When Lee Wilson first saw the Blackrock Creek surging past the cabin for sale at San Clemente Rancho, “I was absolutely enthralled.”

As a kid, he had spent time at a cabin in Boulder Creek with a stream running under it, so “when I saw this I thought, oh, I’ve got to have that. This is where I’ve got to be.”

The previous owners had left the one-bedroom cabin with a loft furnished – with a sofa, leather chair, an oak table and a pair of monumental elk trophy heads on the wall.

“I wasn’t real gung-ho about keeping those,” wife Terry Wilson said of the trophies. She thought their grown daughter “would have a fit and not want to be up there.”

But they didn’t seem to bother her, “so we just left them.”

They were part of the history of the cabin, after all.

An avid antiques collector, Terry Wilson filled the cabin with special touches, from vintage canoe paddles and embroidered samplers to a drum coffee table.

“I tried to pick little things that were Americana-looking, the red, white and blue,” she said. Many pieces are sentimental, from a handcrafted hutch her father made, to her mother’s handwoven Mexican blankets and her parents’ wall clock. On the hearth rest four pairs of children’s cowboy boots that belonged to her, her brother and the most recent addition – her granddaughter’s pink ones.

As much as Terry Wilson loves to decorate, it was Lee Wilson who was adamant about several statement pieces he acquired from places as divergent as the San Francisco Design Center (an American flag tile mosaic for the front walkway) and a roadside trash bin (a shutter for above the kitchen sink). He nailed to the kitchen wall his collection of Griswold cast-iron skillets and placed an old cigar-store Indian that was a gift from a friend at the front gate.

“I just walk in and have extreme calm,” he said. “I don’t go to the pool or the rec center because I’ve got everything right here, the best of all worlds.”

The look:Lakeside rustic

As you walk up the front path to this cabin, you spot the green canoe floating against the deck and wonder whether you’ve actually stepped into a Winslow Homer painting.

Carol and Lin Krebs of Los Gatos were smitten when they laid eyes on the lakeside cabin, made from a cedar log kit in 1972 from Pan-Abode, a company still in business today. The cabin was built by Mike and Donna Dormody and their four children, who bought the rancho in 1960 from the McFadden family that homesteaded the land in the 1920s. Some 16 miles southeast of Carmel, the property lies in the Santa Lucia Mountains – a two-hour drive from the South Bay.

At 1,000 square feet with three bedrooms and a loft, “it was one of the biggest,” said Bruce Dormody, who now runs the entire San Clemente Rancho development. While he and his family own the land, they sell 99-year licensing agreements to cabin owners. (Cabins for sale range from the mid-$100,000s to low-$500,000s, plus membership and other fees, and can be seen at www.mountain-cabins.com.)

At the lakeside cabin, Dormody recalled, none of the bedrooms had closets.

That was a problem the Krebs family set out to change, adding a master bedroom, bath and closet. With the help of decorator Lillian Stahl, they added a crackle finish to the kitchen cabinets, vintage chairs and Western paintings. Exposed pipes in the original bathroom were wrapped with rope.

On Fourth of July weekend, they drape red, white and blue bunting from the railing of the wraparound deck and watch the fish jump, the egrets fly and the kids jump off the swimming platform in the middle of Trout Lake. “You really feel you’re floating on the water,” she said.

Inside, she said, “small, comfortable and cozy was what I really wanted.”

And like most of the cabin owners who have found a respite here, that’s exactly what she got.

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The backyard has a pool, a lawn area and a large outdoor kitchen with a fireplace. So, if you decide to buy, could you please invite me to a party??? Check out the entire virtual tour here.

PS. Earlier our Facebook followers heard that this home is owned by a celebrity—all I can say is it’s a sports figure who has been “transferred”.

With help from Steve Gilbert of Willow Glen Home and Garden, the homeowners, Virginia and Brett Nicoletti, have created the kind of rooms you want to live in. They graciously opened their home to the 2011 Willow Glen Lifestyles home tour.

The front bedroom with the orange palette was one of my favorites. Don’t you just love the bedding?

And the youngest daughter also has a haven all in pink. I also love the vintage-style bedspread in this room.

The 1992 home began an update when the Nicolettis bought it in 2000. They extended hardwoods throughout the house and antiqued the kitchen cabinets.   The result is an elegant space, upstairs and down.

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Don’t you just want to get into this charming English tudor? You can just imagine it’s as lovely on the inside. But hey, why imagine? It is one of five houses, plus a garden, that is being featured in the 2011 Willow Glen Home Tour. And Lookiloos has a pair of tickets — worth $60! — to give away.

Here’s a little advance info about the other homes and garden you will see:

* A remodeled ranch with a wall of windows in the family room leading to a gorgeous pool and yard;

* A southwestern-style bachelor pad with a new kitchen;

* A recently renovated contemporary home filled with a collection of local artwork — and another window wall overlooking a koi pond

* A lovely garden, tended by the homeowner who is a master gardener, features drought resistant plants.  This will also be the setting for a boutique featuring local artist and plants for sale, as well as box lunches.

If you’d like to win a pair of tickets , leave comment below otherwise, please go to sjdn.org to buy tickets that benefit the San Jose Day Nursery.  Tickets are $30 each and box lunches are $13.  Tickets may also be purchased on Lincoln Ave. at Willow Glen Home and Garden, Domus or Grace on the Ave. Tickets are also being sold at Able Printing on Meridian at Hamilton Ave.

You can purchase tickets either day at the ticket house 3245 Bryant Street, Palo Alto or online here.

Leave a comment here and the winner will be announced on Thursday evening.

Thierry Buisson’s parents met in a French military hospital in Marrakech, Morocco. She was a local nurse born and raised there. He was a doctor from a farming village in the south of France.Growing up in Paris, Buisson spent time in both places, from his grandparents’ rustic farmhouse to the colorful marketplaces of Marrakech.Buisson, who came to the United States two decades ago, is a personal shopper at Neiman Marcus in San Francisco and does interior design work on the side. A dining room he decorated with zebra skin and a custom-made topiary of his dog Winston, of all things, was featured in the Summit League’s “Homes for the Holidays” tour last Christmas.

His love of collecting started with his father.

When Buisson was a boy, he and his father would spend weekends at Paris flea markets and antique shops, searching for

“just that magical piece that turns you on.”

It was there he learned “the patience of finding something that makes your heart beat.”

His father would often collect small things, silver and china.

“The biggest piece he ever bought was an 18th-century Aubusson tapestry. My mom just freaked out,” Buisson said. “My dad had to justify every purchase, either hide it or bring it out for a birthday.”

In summers, they would often visit his grandparents in the village of Le Breuil. He remembers two things about the farmhouse in particular:a huge fireplace in the kitchen along with a “gigantic dining room table,” as well as the handmade, white linen sheets in the bedroom that were so cold “it would take us hours to get in bed.”

And every Christmas, the family would travel to his mother’s homeland of Marrakech, where he absorbed the spicy aromas and the colorful textiles. “It’s the most phenomenal, magical place I’ve ever been to,” he said.

And now the home he shares with his partner is filled with the influences of his youth, inside and out.

The front walkway is lined with potted citrus trees, giving you the feeling of approaching a French “orangerie.” Inside, a 19th-century, hand-painted French vaisselier for storing and displaying china sits in the living room — a find from friend Darin Geise who owns the Coup d’Etat showroom across from the Design Center in San Francisco. Atop a leather ottoman is a bright green tray and a Moroccan lantern. Louis XVI chairs are covered in charcoal grey Pierre Frey toile. French doors lead you to a deck that looks like the courtyard of a boutique hotel, with topiaries and Moroccan-tiled wrought-iron tables. On an end table in a guest room is a collection of miniature porcelain busts he collected from the Alameda Point Antiques Faire. In his room, he keeps a collection of antique boxes. His sister, who owns an antique shop in the seventh arrondissement of Paris called “Fauve,” sends him a tiny box for every birthday.

And in an ode to his grandparents, on his bed he keeps French linen sheets. But unlike the farmhouse in France, in his masterbedroom, he has a fireplace to keep them warm.

(Thierry Buisson can be reached at thierryinteriors@gmail.com or 408-828-1685.)

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