Carefully curated antiques turned this cozy Cheltenham cottage into a dream home

The house had paneled shutters and a gabled roof with filigreed wood trim. Porch columns were supported by ornamental brackets. Barbara Kotzin found the Victorian gingerbread cottage of her dreams on a winding road in Cheltenham.

When Kotzin purchased the home in 1973, she replaced asbestos siding with white aluminum siding, installed missing shutters on the second floor, and painted the trim blue and purple.

Inside, she continued the Victorian motif. This is not a gloomy Victorian, though, with dark paneling and heavy maroon drapes. Kotzin’s home, which was built in 1868, is bright and airy. Drapes and valances are cream. Floral wall coverings are in pale hues or have cheerful designs. Art Nouveau prints of ethereal women in long gowns and Kotzin’s joyful needlepoints line walls.

The living room is furnished with an Eastlake-style rocker and cameo-back love seat, upholstered in a mauve and white-patterned fabric. In a corner is a hanging lamp of raspberry glass. Next to the piano, festooned with photos in antique frames, stands a lamp with faces of beautiful women painted on the globe.

The dining room is furnished with an oval oak table and chairs, an oak sideboard, and a corner china cabinet.

Kotzin kept the kitchen’s 1950s white sink and electric stove. “It works perfectly,” she said. White metal cabinets were replaced with oak cabinets with custom-crafted stained glass inserts. Kotzin designed and made the stained glass in the transom over the front door.

Recently, she had blue carpet installed in the dining room and will soon replace the pale pink carpet in other living areas and up the stairs with a dusty rose. The installations required Kotzin to temporarily move her large collection of antique objects, including a window full of vintage glass syrup pitchers, porcelain demitasse cups and saucers, and her grandmother’s samovar on the sideboard and china plates on a wall rail in the dining room.

Over 100 white metal or brass or silver skirt lifters had to be removed from hooks around the dining room mantle. In olden days, women used the devices, which were attached to their belts with a cord, to clamp onto and lift long skirts to avoid dirt and facilitate movement. Kotzin, a retired speech pathologist, has become an authority on skirt lifters and published a reference book about them in 2015.

Over the mantle hangs a wreath of what appears to be woven dried grasses decorated with turquoise beads. The grasses are actually entwined tendrils of blond and brown hair belonging to a 19th-century mother and two daughters.

Kotzin purchases vintage items at antique shows and shops and flea markets. When she bought a jigsaw puzzle of various-sized tobacco and food tins stamped with advertising, she framed the puzzle and made it a mission to acquire the tins illustrated in the puzzle. Her finds, including candy tins with images of actors Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino on the lids, are displayed on shelves on her back porch.

Upstairs there are three rooms and a bath painted purple.

Kotzin’s bedroom with its sage green wallpaper strewed with white and pink flowers has a brass and iron bedstead and an upright cheval mirror with mother-of-pearl inlays. The mirror’s unique design allows it to pivot.

Another room has more than a dozen miniature hot air balloons suspended from the ceiling. Victorians loved the balloons. So does Kotzin, who has gone on two balloon rides.

In the center of the third room is an enormous philodendron. “It’s at least 50 years old,” Kotzins said. On the mantle is a display of miniature bathtubs.

There are larger tubs in the backyard. Kotzin painted four claw-footed bathtubs with flowers, hot air balloons, and birds. A foot tub is painted with cats in honor of her cat, Pumpkin. She painted the back porch stair risers with a purple and lavender abstract design.

“Give me a surface and I’ll paint it,” Kotzin said. In the garden bed next to the steps she planted irises, lilies, cornflowers, and hyacinths.

Kotzin planted crepe myrtle in the front yard and painted swirls of green and purple on the stone bird bath to complement the gingerbread trim on her beloved Victorian.

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