Krisheim isn’t a small project, and it never has been. The restoration of the house ran five years, room by room, floor by floor, guided by one rule from owner Chuck Woodward to his architect: “Put it all back exactly as it was, no matter what it takes.”

The house had earned that scale of effort. At its peak, it ran on a staff of forty, including gardeners, chauffeurs, and maids, a household built for a way of life that didn’t survive the century.

By the time Gertrude Woodward died in 1961, no one could sustain a house built for forty anymore. Like many other grand houses in the Philadelphia region, Krisheim got donated to the church, which turned into a Presbyterian conference center, then later into nine separate apartments.

Contractor Dennis Meyer and most of the crew had worked on Woodward properties before. The roofer, for example, had been working on the house for decades. The electrician pulling wire was replacing work his own father had installed fifty years earlier.

Detwiler was the newcomer.

“We all became part of the history of this site,” Detwiler says. “It’s very much like an English country house, where the people who work in and around these places become part of the place as well.” According to family lore, Detwiler says, one of the original stonemasons recalled that there had been four men carving the stone a century earlier, and that he could still tell one’s hand from another because each had “their own kind of individuated style.”

Some things had to change. “Bathroom layouts from 1910 aren’t exactly how we would design bathrooms today,” Detwiler says. “But the locations of the bathrooms are the same.”

Other things didn’t. An entire corner of the house, where a fire stair had been punched through decades earlier to meet apartment-era codes, came out completely, and that side of the building was reconstructed from scratch. Roughly fifteen original steel-and-leaded-glass Crittall windows, discarded decades earlier, turned up in the basement. “We didn’t need to fabricate any new windows,” Detwiler says. “We only used original windows.”

But perhaps the best story from the job site involves the porch roof. When it was reconstructed, and needed new slate, the contractor discovered a stash of old slate shingles in the basement, which were chalk-labeled from the 1950’s teardown.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he told Detwiler, “but we pulled all this slate out into the yard and it’s all labeled in chalk.” The pieces were marked sequentially when they were removed decades earlier, and were carefully reinstalled during the restoration. The new porch needed only about 20 percent new material.

Chuck inherited much of the family’s furniture, paintings, and library along with the house itself, so very little in the restored house is new. Even the books came home. “We know what they read because we have so many of their books,” Detwiler says. “You can see their hand-written comments in the margins. Some are George’s, but many are Gertrude’s, too.”