Kirkwood Renovators Build on Their Success
By Jen Christensen
Photos by Renee Hannans Henry
February 15, 2007
RENEE HANNANS HENRY/Staff
Kara O’ Brien Renovations uses reclaimed building materials as much as possible. The company’s owners say that method of renovation reflects their Southern values to want to preserve the history of the homes’ location.
A$25 home repair book changed the lives of Kirkwood residents Kara O’Brien and Paula Rose, and in time, the neighborhood around them.
“I had no idea how to even use a hammer back then,” O’Brien said
The life partners bought the book in 1998 after falling hard for a house in the Atlanta-in-DeKalb neighborhood that was in abysmal shape.
The claw-foot tub sat in the dining room. The plumbing had exploded. A sheet of plywood substituted for the front door.
“We would have to signal through the window any time someone came to deliver packages,” O’Brien said.
That was only the beginning of the problems. But love is blind, or so pundits say, and the two renovation novices weren’t daunted by the challenges. “With the repair book, I figured if we could read a recipe, we could figure this out,” O’Brien said. “Not that we ever cooked anything.”
After reading dozens more repair books and spending five years working on the home, the two had transformed it into something beautiful.
But O’Brien said she couldn’t rest. She was hooked, a real renovating junkie. “Some women go to bars, others watch TV. I live to go to the hardware store.”
Enabling her partner’s new addiction, Rose agreed that they should buy another house around the block. Back then they had to fit the home improvement work around their corporate jobs. But when other people hired them to help with their renovations, Rose and O’Brien decided it was time to start a company, Kara O’ Brien Renovations.
“You can always tell if it’s a Laughing Sun house,” said client Chris Wilkinson, a native Atlantan. Wilkinson and her husband hired Laughing Sun to work on both the houses they bought in the Kirkwood neighborhood. They were drawn to O’Brien and Rose’s philosophy about renovations.
RENEE HANNANS HENRY/Staff
Kara O’Brien (left) and Paula Rose started Kara O’ Brien Renovations after renovating their own homes in Kirkwood.
“When you grow up in the South you feel a deep connectedness to the land, even if you live in an urban environment,” Wilkinson said.
“An old house gives you this same kind of connectedness to the place that you love so much. You feel your place in history and know that you are a part of something bigger. Paula and Kara completely get that. That’s why their work is so fantastic.”
Out of what they call a tree-hugger sensibility and real love of history, O’Brien and Rose create that special sense of place, finding old photos of the home and restoring it to what it once was. They use reclaimed material to accent the homes they renovate.
In Wilkinson’s Kirkwood home at 45 Bates Ave., Laughing Sun replaced damaged floors with salvaged heart pine from a house in Ohio. They used several stained glass windows from homes built in the 1920s. Pocket doors came from England. The back door once hung in a house being demolished in the West End.
This approach to renovations has earned Laughing Sun praise from national magazines and a feature story on HGTV. But their methods may not catch on in other states.
“No one wants to do this kind of work because it’s a real pain in the tuchus,” O’Brien said. “It is so much more labor-intensive to restore these old pieces, and you have to involve so many people to do it. And then there’s the storage issue.”
The two must continuously seek out new-old material. They find it at estate sales, antique stores, online and from a network of national and local suppliers. They even have a “Dumpster diver” who specializes in salvaging parts from homes being demolished in the West End.
All that material has to go somewhere before it has a permanent home. Rose and O’Brien’s basement became the default refuge for recycled house parts. There are redwood doors, old school fixtures, medicine cabinets, even an entire wrap around Victorian porch.
“At one point I had a whole claw-foot bathtub armada docked there,” O’Brien said.
Business has been good to Laughing Sun, but O’Brien said they don’t want a renovation empire. That would mean they couldn’t focus on the quality, detailed work for which they’re known. Laughing Sun has turned a profit, but O’Brien said that’s not the most important thing to them.
“Some of our clients think we’re crazy and they believe no matter what we tell them, we are in it for the money — that is, until we refuse to give in when they want to rip out authentic elements,” she said. “If that’s the case we tell them, ‘This house is not for you.’ ”
O’Brien said most of her clients share their passion for preserving the character of Atlanta’s neighborhoods. They, too, want to save these old houses, even if it means keeping some of their elements by adding them to other houses.
“The whole reason we’re in this business,” she said, “is because we’re passionate about the authenticity of these wonderful old houses.”
