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An Asbury Park Victorian Gets a ‘Really Fun’ Face-Lift

The playful renovation preserved many of the home’s original details, but emphasized carefree weekend living.

Matt Berman and Jim Mumma discovered Asbury Park, N.J., well before its revitalization was in full swing, when whispers about the neglected oceanfront city were just starting to reach Manhattanites in search of a weekend escape.

“We had heard through a friend of a friend that Asbury was this cool place, and it was on the gay-radar map,” said Mr. Berman, 49, a founding principal of the New York-based architecture firm Workshop/APD.

So when they were driving by one day in 2001, they decided to make a quick detour to check it out. “It was very run down, and you really had to see through the grit,” said Mr. Mumma, 56, a high school teacher. “There was a boardwalk, but not a single restaurant. Everything was boarded up.”

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Matt Berman, left, and Jim Mumma bought and renovated an 1891 house in Asbury Park, N.J., accessorizing it with unexpected details like the yellow stripe that wraps around the entrance.Credit...Read McKendree

But they saw the silver linings. “It’s an hour from the city, it has a mile of beachfront, and it’s a super-cute kind of Victorian town,” Mr. Berman said.

On that very first visit, the couple struck up conversations with people they encountered in the streets and began making friends. The following year, they bought a dilapidated house that had holes in the floor and had been chopped up into three apartments, paying $250,000. At the time, Mr. Berman said, “Asbury was incredibly affordable, so it was easy to take a risk.”

Over the coming years, they spent their weekends slowly rehabilitating the house and transforming it into their home.

“We were at Home Depot 17 times a day, and there were periods when we didn’t have any working plumbing, so we would go to Costco” to use the bathrooms, Mr. Berman said. “But it was a community, and we’d see all of our friends at Home Depot. Everyone was down there doing the same thing.”

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To brighten the stairwell, they added a geometric mural of dark teal, mustard yellow and aqua blue, painted by Walter Myers.Credit...Read McKendree

In 2007, after most of the work was complete, they welcomed the arrival of their son, Owen, now 14. A few years later they added a Victorian bulldog, Watson, to the mix. And as they began entertaining more, the 1,800-square-foot house they had lovingly renovated began to feel a little small.

So in 2016, when they saw a listing for a 4,000-square-foot, three-story shingled house from 1891, with a detached 1,200-square-foot guesthouse in back, they decided to buy it, eventually selling their first house. The price of the new house, after a bidding war, was $600,000.

Their new old house had been restored by the previous owners, and much of the original woodwork was intact. The couple liked the historical details, but the interior was a Victorian time capsule — with a floor plan broken up by small, dark rooms — and didn’t feel right for their family. That was doubly true for Mr. Berman, whose firm is known for designing clean-lined modernist spaces.

To renovate it, they planned to preserve as many of the original details as possible, while opening up the house to create a relaxed, convivial atmosphere filled with playful, unexpected finishes. “For us, it was an opportunity to celebrate a lot of the classic details, but give them a face-lift,” Mr. Berman said. “We wanted this house to be really fun.”

In the front part of the house, they left most of the architecture in tact, but changed its personality with new finishes, fixtures and colors. A ribbon of yellow paint now leads up the front steps, rises up along the front door and wraps back over the porch ceiling. In a games room immediately off the foyer, they bleached the wood floors and added wallpaper resembling wood paneling and a woven-bamboo suspension lamp above a walnut Ping-Pong table with a leather net.

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The dining room has a 12-person table with a steel top, custom-made by Cleveland Art. The seating is a mix of Wishbone chairs by Hans J. Wegner (from $620 each) and custom benches.Credit...Read McKendree

To brighten the stairwell leading to the second floor, they hired Walter Myers, a local painter, to cover the walls in a geometric mural with angular swaths of dark teal, mustard yellow and aqua blue.

In the back of the house, which was a later addition, they made bigger architectural changes, demolishing most of the interior walls and blowing out the rear wall to create an airy kitchen and living room terminating in a wall of glass sliders that look out to a new pool and patio.

On the second floor, they combined two bedrooms to make a large primary suite with a bathroom that has a glass-box shower at the center and a black-and-white floral mural painted by Mr. Myers wrapping the walls. By converting yet another bedroom off the primary suite into a home office, they reduced the total bedroom count to six from eight, which still leaves them plenty of space for guests (even while they rent out the detached guesthouse).

It took a little more than a year for their contractor, Doughty Builders, to renovate most of the house. “Then we moved in, like most people do, and were living in finishing-up construction toward the end,” Mr. Berman said, until the project was finally complete in early 2018. They added the pool and landscaping that summer and fall. The total cost of the transformation was about $800,000.

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The backyard has a new terraced patio and pool. The Lollygagger Adirondack-style chairs are from Loll (about $548 each).Credit...Read McKendree

To furnish the home, they recruited independent artisans on Etsy and locally to build robust custom pieces that wouldn’t make them feel anxious when guests sloshed drinks or traipsed through in wet bathing suits. Those pieces include a 12-person dining table with a steel top, a pair of wooden benches for the table, tree-stump stools in the foyer, a concrete desk and metal side tables.

“We didn’t want to be worried all the time about people, dogs, kids, friends, my dad with a glass of red wine and so on,” Mr. Berman said. “So everything, especially on the ground floor, was done in a bulletproof way.”

With one exception: “You can’t carry your own suitcase up the stairs,” Mr. Mumma said, because they don’t want the mural getting scuffed. “That’s the practical reality of having art in your hallway.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section RE, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Giving an 1891 Victorian a ‘Really Fun’ Face-Lift. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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