How Patrick Garman made the McKean Mansion his home
CELESTE VAN KIRK
patrickgarman
CELESTE VAN KIRK
The McKean Mansion owner by Patrick Garman.
CELESTE VAN KIRK
Patrick Garman sitting in his favorite room of the house the den.
CELESTE VAN KIRK
The livingroom in the McKean Mansion,
CELESTE VAN KIRK
One of the bedroom in the McKean Mansion.
CELESTE VAN KIRK
The foyer in the McKean Mansion.
One of the bedroom in the McKean Mansion.
When Patrick Garman’s children saw the big old house he had bought and planned to restore, their first reaction was horror.
“I still have a video of my kids walking down there my son laughing and my daughter screaming and yelling,” Garman remembers.
He admits the place looked like some sort of creepy haunted house. “It looked truly like a dungeon. None of the bathrooms worked.”
But this wasn’t just any big old empty house. This was the McKean Mansion, a 5,000 square foot, three-story Eastlake Victorian home built by Charleroi co-founder John C. McKean in 1895. It sits on an acre of land and boasts 40 steps from the street up to the front porch.
Why invest in such an old house that needed so much restoration? Garman grew up around such stately homes in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, Mich., and still has Victorian architecture engraved on his heart.
“I’m a sucker for the old stuff,” says Garman, 60, who has called the mansion home for five years. “The character of the architecture, the prep work. Just visualizing the technology, or lack thereof, the materials, the skill set that these workers had. It’s a tribute to their craftsmanship that many of these structures are still standing after a hundred-plus years.”
Garman spent time in San Francisco and San Antonio after getting out of the Army and moved to Pittsburgh to become executive administrator of Spartan Health in Monongahela. He and his family settled in Mt. Lebanon, but he was charmed by some of the architecture he saw around the Mon Valley.
“I was just having a cup of coffee and thought, ‘I’m just going to hit realtor.com,'” Garman says. “There’s all this beautiful architecture down here, let’s just see what’s going on. And I just came upon it.”
He was intrigued by the beautiful pictures of the mansion and decided to take a look in person. He was impressed and intrigued and brought in a contractor to assess the situation. He bought the property in December 2013 and started renovations in 2015. Garman says he was fortunate to be able to stay in the house during the entire process because he didn’t gut anything. He did some of the work himself, but also hired a very experienced contractor whose specialty is plasterwork. They planned to do one floor at a time, one room at a time. That is quite the undertaking when you consider the scope of the project: three stories, seven fireplaces, seven bedrooms, four bathrooms, a library, formal dining room, double parlor, two staircases, kitchen, butler’s pantry and servant’s quarters. And, yes, there’s a ballroom on the top floor.
“We had to refinish fireplaces that had been painted over,” recalls Garman. “Over the years, there had been some neglect. I think some of the previous occupants just lacked the funds to do what was necessary to maintain them. The house had hand-painted murals, but by the time I got it, they had been so badly damaged the plaster was chipping off.”
Because of the age of the structure and his love for historical architecture, he wanted to maintain the mansion’s original character.
“You have to be very careful,” he says. “I walked through the house, and there were holes in the ceiling, plaster and water damage. The gutters were leaking. There were huge chunks of ceiling removed, rafters exposed. Several parts had to have the floors sanded, refinished and re-stained.”
Then came the front porch, which stretches a little more than 100 linear feet.
“Because it’s such a large house, the front porch is wraparound,” Garman says. “You could easily fit 50 to 75 people in an outdoor gathering.”
But its restoration was the single most expensive part of the project and took six weeks to complete. “The original pillars were falling apart,” he says. “There was a lot of wood rot.”
Now, after four years of hard work and elbow grease, Garman says renovations are “95% complete.”
And that porch?
“I can sit on the front porch because it’s covered, nice and shady,” he says. “It’s comfortable. I can watch the entire city and the Mon River from the wicker furniture that I have. I can sit in my library and light up a pipe, pour myself a brandy and read a good book.”
This labor of love is now home for Garman and his two children. His son’s bedroom resembles a hunting lodge, he says, and his daughter has claimed two bedrooms. The bathrooms are all working now, and there’s just a bit of plasterwork to finish here and there.
“The big room in the back that was the original ballroom, I’m going to turn it into a billiard room,” he muses. “Probably a bar and a nice comfortable chair with a big flat screen.”
As for furnishings, Garman found those fairly easily.
“I just went on a shopping blitz and bought a whole bunch of antiques on Craigslist,” Garman says. “I was able to basically get a lot of furniture, all period Victorian serpentine wingback, all throughout the house.”
While other homeowners his age are downsizing, why go bigger? “I tell people this all the time, the house is barely big enough for me,” Garman says. “I lived in studio apartments as a student in San Francisco. I know what it’s like to put stuff in steamer trunks and pack things and put things in storage off-site. And when people come over, you have to check them into a hotel because you’re not going to have them sleep on the floor. Enough of that.”
His parents passed away a few years ago, and the extra space has allowed him to hold onto some of his parents’ belongings from his childhood home that hold great sentimental value.
“I’m 60, and over time, you accumulate a lot, and you become a kind of a collector.”
He says the McKean Mansion is just the right size.
“I don’t know if it qualifies for a mansion,” Garman says. “Perhaps back then, but I’m comfortable with just a nice big home, a nice big comfortable home that’s well-built and full of character.”
As administrator of a surgery center as well as the property manager of the building, Garman has his hands full at work. But the renovation of this house is a labor of love.
“It’s something I’ve always wanted to do my entire life – live in a Victorian house,” Garman says. “I didn’t want to spend a million dollars on it. It was close to work, it was convenient. I’ve always wanted a majestic home that spoke volumes, and when you looked at it from a variety of angles with all its angular pitches, it’s just a very majestic site to see. It’s not for everybody, and that’s what makes it unique. You have to appreciate this for being the artwork that it is.”