Step inside this Gilroy home and feel like you’re on a movie set
from 1930s Hollywood
There is something movie-like about the house at 314 Fifth St. in Gilroy.
You can imagine Judy Garland coming down the steep staircase or dancing in the living room a la “Meet Me in St. Louis.” The exterior, with its green shutters and stately appearance, is distinctly reminiscent of Tara, the O’Hara family home in “Gone With the Wind.” And the front porch is begging for Gregory Peck, as Atticus Finch, to come and sit a spell – the only thing missing is the porch swing.
But the house in Gilroy, built sometime between 1850 and 1860, was the setting for something much better than a movie. It was a home that real people loved and lived in, the scene of many family memories.
“Our first child was born in that house in 1975,” said David Reid, whose father, Maurice, currently owns the house. “My wife and I lived upstairs because we’d made it like a little studio apartment, and my parents lived downstairs in the main house.”
When Maurice bought the house in late 1972, it was on the verge of being condemned by the city, David said. Homeless people had been living inside the empty shell of a building, and both the interior and exterior of the house were in shambles.
“My dad’s co-workers thought he was crazy for buying such a rough old place when we already lived in a fairly nice tract house,” David remembered. “And it was really unusual in the ’70s to have people restore an old house to look like it did in the 1860s. Most people were tearing them down to build apartments. But that house, my father just felt like it had a lot of potential.”
Renovating the house became a family project. Maurice was a building contractor, and David, then in his mid-20s, was on his way to becoming a building contractor, too.
“My father and I were just starting to work together, so I was able to learn a lot from him on that project. It was like an apprenticeship for me,” David said. “It was a great project, and at the time, everyone looked at us like, ‘Geez, what are you guys doing that for?,” but it seemed like there was always someone from the neighborhood dropping in to see how the progress was going.”
The upstairs of the house, now one big open room with a kitchenette, was once crammed with cubicle-like rooms, which the Reids tore out.
The house, having been built during the late 19th century, originally had no plumbing and an outhouse. At some point, someone had added bathrooms and plumbing, but the Reids tore it all out and replaced it and all the electrical wiring with what was modern in the ’70s.
When the Reids bought the house, the current living room was divided into a parlor and dining area, and the kitchen was located at the back corner of the house, where the master bedroom currently stands. The Reids ripped everything out and started again, making the layout of the house brighter and more open but maintaining the integrity of the house. They moved the kitchen, added a breakfast nook and a deck on the second story that created a covered outdoor seating area at the side of the house.
In an effort to make the renovations as authentic as possible, the Reids took advantage of the destruction of other 19th century buildings.
“At that time, there were no reproductions of 1850-style moldings or siding or anything,” David said. “If you wanted anything from that period, you had to find it. So, we went out and found other old buildings that were going to be torn down, and we pretty much cannibalized from there.”
The shutters on the house and many of the doors inside came from other old buildings, and the family acquired some of the moldings that were ripped out of the Hotel Milias during a remodel, and the maple floors now covering the ground level came from Jordan School, which once stood on Hannah Street between Second and Third streets. It was torn down when it couldn’t meet earthquake safety standards.
“There was very little there when my father bought the house, ” David remembered. “There were a couple of old shudders, a few old window casings, the original fireplace. But there wasn’t a lot to work with.”
The Reids made the house livable within a year, and once most of the renovations were complete, Maurice’s wife, Oda, took charge of decorating the house. She selected fixtures and wallpaper that kept with the period of the house, which she enjoyed, David said. One decoration she conceded to her husband was blue flocked wallpaper in one of the back bedrooms. Flocked paper, which has a pattern on it made from fuzzy-velvet like material, was popular in the late 1800s.
“The landscaping was a group effort, but my mom did a lot of it,” he continued. “She liked to work in the garden, she liked to do the roses. The orange tree has been there forever. There was a man who lived down the street on Rosanna who was between 65 and 70 years old at the time, and he said he remembered stealing the oranges from that tree as a child.”
Though David and his wife, Laure, only lived in the house with Maurice and Oda for about four years, the whole family, including David’s other siblings, would return to the home every Christmas and Thanksgiving.
“We’d fill up that large room downstairs,” David said. “We’d have a table that stretched from one end of the room to the other. ”
Oda passed away about seven years ago, and Maurice moved up north to be closer to his children last summer. The house is now for sale for $875,000 and currently stands empty.
“The place is for sale, but you can’t sell memories. We’re building contractors, so it’s just a really fun project to us, it’s just a house,” David said. “The nostalgia I feel is not so much for the house, but for the memories we made there. We’ll always think of the house as a great place we got together as a family, and you can’t put a price tag on that.”
