Making new memories from old walls: Restoring an iconic historic home in Springboro

“I wanted to do Aron right,” Cheryl said. “I wanted to do right by Springboro. We wanted to bring the magic back — and you can only do that if you get it right.”

The home was built in 1857 by Dr. Aron Wright, a medical doctor and one of the founders of the now defunct Miami Valley College, a Quaker college in Springboro. Wright’s father founded the city of Springboro, and the Wright family left its mark across the region. The Aron Wright House has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1979.

Cheryl hadn’t set out to renovate a historic property. She and her husband, Larry, had just closed on another home when he announced to her in 2019, “Honey, I bought the Wright House.” Cheryl’s first reaction?

“I didn’t know we’d bought the wrong house!”

Yet the more she learned about the Wright family and their contributions to Springboro and Southwest Ohio, the more she wanted to see the house restored.

“The Wrights really were ahead of their time,” she said, noting that the house has the perfect flow for entertaining and is designed to make the most of natural light.

Unusual for its era, the house has many large closets and is said to be one of the first homes in the area to have running water.

But when the Dillins bought the home in 2019, it was showing its age and needed significant structural and cosmetic work.

The first and most important task was to stabilize the home and make sure it was safe. The all-wood foundation had settled over the past 160 years so that one side of the house was 4- to 5-inches lower than the other.

A structural expert carefully lifted the center of the house ¼-inch at a time, waiting weeks in-between for the house to adjust. Next steps included rewiring the house, rebuilding the front and back porches, updating the plumbing and putting on a new roof.

Once the structural and safety concerns were addressed, the Dillins could move to more aesthetic projects. These, too, Cheryl approached with a commitment the history of the home while balancing the need to modernize its function and appearance.

One of the most difficult of these projects was choosing the exterior paint color — something that would immediately attract the attention — good or bad — of everyone driving by the iconic house.

Although the home had long been painted white, Cheryl wanted a shade that would bring out its character while still being historically accurate for the period. She painstakingly researched exterior paint colors of that era and was inspired by the famous Painted Ladies, a row of painted houses in San Francisco. She bought dozens and dozens of paint colors to test, seeking the perfect shade for the home, ultimately settling on a blue-gray hue.

“I was sweating bullets,” Cheryl said. “I lost sleep.”

Springboro residents had grown up seeing that home all their lives. How would they react to a change this significant? “The reaction was incredibly positive,” Cheryl said. “I slept very well that night.”

The Dillins also did major landscaping and landscape lighting work. They cut dead and invasive trees and brush while nursing back to health the property’s old sycamores. They planted lilacs, lavender, hostas and ferns and other plants that would have been used at the time.

“We were very intentional about the landscaping,” Cheryl said.

Although the home was built to take best advantage of the natural light, for modern-day lifestyles, it needed more illumination at night. The Dillins added lighting and replaced all the light fixtures.

For interior lighting and wallpaper choices, Cheryl considered the function of each room and the need for an updated appearance. She chose items in the style of the era but did not buy any antique or period fixtures.

The Dillins also repainted every room except the attic, repaired the ceiling plaster and drywall, and added modern amenities like a fire pit in the back.

The renovation process took about 18 months and relied extensively on local craftspeople and experts. That’s one of the lessons Cheryl says she learned from the project — the vital importance of finding the right technical expert for each project.

“So few people know tradecraft today,” she said. “I had to do the research to even know what to ask before I could choose the right vendor.”

Despite all the work, much of the home is the same as when Aron Wright built it. All the walls are in the same place, it still has its original entry doors, woodwork, floor and windows. And Cheryl made sure to keep and enhance the home’s historic quirks, like old magazine and newspaper cutouts glued to a wall upstairs, and a mill stone from the Wright family’s grist mill placed along the front driveway.

There’s still so much she’d like to do, such as further refurbishing the floors and woodwork and renovating the smokehouse and barn.

“And I’d never run out of landscaping projects,” she said.

But the future for any historic property relies on more than just a renovation. Cheryl wonders how the area around the house will evolve. Will developers and officials consider the beautiful historic property when they’re planning commercial development next door? Their decisions will have an impact on how the property is preserved for generations to come, she said.

So far, the community has embraced the renovations.

“My favorite thing is when people walk in the house and see it for the first time — that look on their face,” she said. “I get joy out of making new memories out of the old walls. Filling the space with positive energy.”

Although Larry once lived in a historic home, this was Cheryl’s first time tackling a historic renovation. She doesn’t blink when asked if she’d renovate another historic property in the future.

“Yes, of course,” she says. “I’m a glutton for punishment. If I had another opportunity like this one, I’d do it again.”

More about Dr. Aaron Wright

The house

Cheryl Dillin’s advice for historic home restoration