Centre County has an abundance of houses that are unusual and memorable in one or more ways — style, construction, decoration, innovations, or history. Four standouts that are truly unique include the pink Painted Lady house in Harris Township, the Mid- Century Modern “Purple House” in State College, the underground house near Howard, and the historic John Henry Simler House in Philipsburg.
The Painted Lady House
Mark Bregar saw the white Victorian house in an ad at Applied Research Lab, where he worked.
“Someone was selling it and put it up on the bulletin board,” says his wife, Bellamarie Bregar. “We both fell in love just by looking at it. Then we came up to see it, and as soon as we rounded the corner, we said, ‘That’s it. That’s our house.”
“We moved in during the July 4, 1986, weekend,” Mark says.”
The house was built in 1880 and originally had three bedrooms and one bathroom with a claw foot tub upstairs, Bellamarie says.
They removed the overgrown evergreens covering the porch, then the orange shag carpeting, revealing hardwood floors. They gutted and remodeled the kitchen and installed a new wood stove for heating.
In 1992, they built an addition to match the original house that included a second bathroom downstairs with a shower, another bedroom, closets, and a metal spiral staircase.
“We kept everything as true to the house as we could,” she says. “We waited until we put the addition on before we actually started painting it pink.”
She and her dad picked the colors, pink with green trim, inspired by the bright colors of the Painted Ladies houses in her hometown of Skaneateles, New York. It took the whole summer to paint it.
Not everyone was happy, she says. Her kids were teased about living in the Pepto Bismol house.
In 1999, they painted it harvest gold with trim in deep purple, pink, and later almond.
Bellamarie says, “I never really liked the gold, so that’s when we went back to pink.”
In 2013, they painted the house pink with green, yellow, deep purple, and a darker pink, using a lift. They learned the house had always been white when Mark sanded and primed it.
“We’re going to paint this summer,” Bellamarie says. “I’m leaning toward a mint green, and a lilac, and maybe a little yellow in there, and some pink. Something a little bit different. It’ll be the last time we paint.”
“Maybe,” Mark says.
The Purple House
The Purple House, a well-known landmark at 201 W. Prospect Ave., was designed and built by Penn State professor and architect Philip Hallock in 1947 to be his family’s home and the first Mid- Century Modern house in State College.
“It was a place where my grandfather could try out different ideas. Kind of an experiment,” says his grandson, Troy Hallock of Reedsville. “My grandfather, in his day, was very well-known and respected as an architect.” Phil Hallock ran an architectural firm in an office above the garage while he was a professor.
For many years, architecture professors brought students to the house to study it.
Troy Hallock says his grandfather made five major additions to the house. It became known as the Purple House in 1973 when, at the request of his wife, Kitty, he painted it purple during the fifth and largest renovation.
As part of the 1973 addition, Hallock says his grandfather added a new three-story section to the original one-story house including a bedroom, laundry room, bathroom, and a gold latticework façade. He built the first indoor pool in State College and used mirror glass for the windows.
“Part of the Mid-Century Modern style is to bring the outside in. … An area of the living room is open to the ground and a large plant has been growing there since 1947,” Hallock says. His grandfather used stones excavated from the yard while constructing the house.
Philip Hallock built fireplaces in most of his houses and liked to include built-in furniture and designs of repeating squares.
The Purple House’s cantilevered dining room table has no legs and extends out from the back of the stone fireplace.
The house has five bedrooms. The original three bedrooms feature built-in dressers, desks, and shelves. “You just need to add a bed,” Hallock says.
His grandfather built radiant floor heating under the original stone floors and in the concrete floors, including the garage.
“Lighting was very important to him,” Hallock says.
His grandfather studied natural lighting at building sites during planning, leading him to create a diversity of lamps and incorporate dramatic built-in lighting.
The Purple House has become an innovative and iconic part of the State College townscape, and served as a real-world learning experience for future architects.
The Underground House
Doyle Heaton’s interest in underground houses began in high school as a joke. “I took up architectural drafting and they had us draw a house. I drew one and it started off to be a prank because I didn’t want to draw every shingle, every line, every angle. … So I did an earth home.
The teacher said, ‘Alright, Mr. Smarty Pants. I want to see a report of what you just built.’ So that got me started.”
The Howard and Lock Haven native studied solar and earth science at Williamsport Area Community College, then worked for companies that built earth homes in Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland. “When we were done, the homeowners would always complain. That’s when I would write everything down.”
The biggest complaints were condensation and echoing in homes with flat roofs. He designed a prototype that resolved the problems, and built it near Howard in 2004-05, completing most of the work himself through his company, DA Heat and Excavating.
He prevented the echoes by using a pitched roof with a loft in the center. The roof is covered with three layers of 3/8” rubber, glued together, and three feet of screened topsoil.
The home has an open floor plan, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms with a laundry room, plus a wall of large south-facing, double-paned windows using non-UV glass. The walls are constructed of cinderblocks, rebar, and concrete.
Heaton used passive systems when possible so no motors were needed to make it work — geothermal heating and cooling, and solar heating. He painted the floor dark brown and installed vertical blinds as part of the solar heating system.
“It took 29 inches of overhang to stop the sun from coming too far into the house in the summertime. In the wintertime it went clear into the 30-foot-wide house and up a wall three feet.”
The radiant floor heating prevents condensation by heating the air using an active geothermal system powered by propane. Two window wells in the back of the house open up to circulate air and allow hot, humid air to escape.
“I tried to make it as low maintenance as I could,” Heaton says. “That was the perk for me. Low maintenance and efficiency.”
The John Henry Simler House
Philipsburg’s oldest standing structure, the 1807 John Henry Simler House, was restored to its original appearance after Robert and Barbara Bezilla (a Simler descendent) bought the building and donated it to Philipsburg Borough in 1997, the town’s bicentennial year.
The Philipsburg Heritage Foundation launched the Simler house restoration project that year, in honor of the bicentenial. It hired architectural engineer Nick Gianopulos to conduct the restoration work and remove later additions built over the original house.
Mark Seinfelt, the PHF project chairman, is Simler’s great-great-great-grandson. “After the house was built of logs, they put clapboard on it and eventually it had asbestos shingles. After we started restoring it, we sort of undressed the house … and were astonished to find that so much of the original 2½ story log dwelling that was built in 1807 was still intact.”
He says Simler and his second wife were two of the original 12 Philipsburg settlers in 1797.
“This was his second house in Philipsburg and it was a very large house. It has four staircases, two floors, an attic, and a basement.”
Seinfelt says it was very luxurious house for that time, with glass panes in all the windows plus an attic window. Most houses had dirt floors and were one story log cabins or had a loft. The Simler house was a stop on the Erie turnpike, so it was a stagecoach stop and tavern.
Finding peg holes on the back of the house helped them reconstruct the lean-to that served as Simler’s shoe shop. They also found evidence supporting the replacement of the fireplace, as well as the wooden gutters and downspouts. A damaged section of the wood floor was repaired, and the mud chinking between the logs was replaced with latex chinking.
“The roof was made of hand-cut side-lapped German style wooden shingles of yellow pine. Around the 1830s, an addition was built on and there still was a section of the original roof intact that is now displayed inside the Simler house. We were able to duplicate the roof because a section was still preserved,” he says.
Seinfelt has researched Simler’s history for his award-winning historical novel and has enjoyed his role in preserving the Simler House. “We consider it a town treasure. It opens up a window onto Philipsburg history.” T&G
Karen Dabney is a freelance writer in State College.
