Contractor transforms condemned, fire-damaged house into modern home

Ted Swider moved to St. Louis from Colorado at age 17 after graduating high school, joining his brother who was living in the Grove neighborhood. He had visited a few times and was inspired by renovation projects his brother was working on. Uncertain what to do with next chapter of his life, Swider took a leap of faith and, with his brother’s help, purchased an old house to fix up in the Grove through St. Louis’ Land Reutilization Act program.

Through LRA, the city sells previously abandoned and foreclosed properties for an extremely low price in order to bring them back into productive use. With no previous experience, Swider learned construction skills working on the house through a lot of research, trial and error and an undaunted spirit.

Swider would take these lessons to his next project, a fire-gutted and abandoned house in the Gravois Park neighborhood that he purchased through LRA for a mere $1,500 in 2018. Originally built in 1908, the brick home was dilapidated with its back third falling in and half the roof missing. Yet, it was the perfect size, and Swider had a distinct vision of what it could be.

“I had a formula in my head that I wanted to do everything all exposed and replace the entire roof structure and floor structure,” he says. “I have this idea that a true craftsman builds honesty into his creations — so what you see is what you get. There’s nothing to hide. All the work is done neatly and orderly, and it just presents itself for what it is.”

He opted for a quick and easy demo, using an excavator to go in through the open back of the house and rip everything out. With only the brick exterior shell mostly intact, Swider began with a clean slate to bring his vision to life. He fully designed the floorplan himself, consulting with an engineer on sizing and structural considerations.

The original house was composed of a main floor living area and a basement with a stone foundation. Contrary to homes of the period, Swider opted to create a fully open, loft-style interior with the main floor overlooking the lower-level from an atrium framed by an iron railing.

The main floor includes a living room space in the front and bedroom space in the back. An open spiral staircase leads to the lower level, where the kitchen is located, along with the bathroom and an entertaining area with a pool table and seating.

Swider constructed the house and most of its interior finishes out of salvaged materials. The home’s original brick only went up about 6 feet on the main floor, and brick had to be laid atop the stone foundation on the lower-level to lay a new floor, so he had to source around 12,000 bricks to complete the home. He purchased some on Facebook Marketplace and sought out homes that were being demolished to acquire others. The resulting look is a unique patchwork of colors and textures that serve as a testament to St. Louis’ brick history.

“There are signs of age on all of these. Beauty is fleeting in nature, so when you see something that is beautiful and old, it kind of transcends that aging process and that is really magnificent to me,” Swider says.

He built the ceiling of exposed pine lumber coated in polyurethane and installed durable bamboo flooring. With no framing or drywall in the house, Swider saved a great deal of money on finishing. Large windows at each end of the main floor, as well as smaller side windows of salvaged glass blocks fill the space with natural light.

Swider even fabricated the unique kitchen and bathroom cabinetry himself out of thousands of tiny pieces of scrap hardwood glued together and cut. A unique backsplash was created from a beat-up piece of steel he found in an alley that he wire-brushed, then oiled and waxed. A one-of-a-kind chandelier Swider crafted from the metal harp of an old grand piano, also found in an alley, is suspended over the dining table from the main floor ceiling above.

“I feel bad throwing things away when they can be used. I just love salvaging things,” he says.

The feature of the home that Swider is most proud of is an organic kitchen island made from one thick slab of poured concrete with exposed aggregate mounted on top of a footing.

“I drew this up when I bought the house,” says Swider. “This might be one of the coolest things I’ve ever made.”

The home’s exterior blends well with the old brick houses surrounding it, but much of it had to be rebuilt. Swider created the staircase and small front porch from scratch, incorporating some decorative white bricks he salvaged from the original porch. He constructed the porch roof from wood that came from a tree taken down in Webster Groves. Swider also altered the exterior roofline and embedded a pair of cement lion head reliefs, inspiring his name for the home – “Lion’s Head Lair.”

“I wanted to pull out architectural elements that were original that I liked and make them more impressive and tied to other St. Louis architectural elements,” he says of his design.

Swider completed the home — a six-year labor of love — last fall and is now focused on building his woodworking business and enjoying the payoff of all of his hard work.

“I’m really pleased with how it turned out. It feels really good to be in here,” he says.