Historical Homes
Serving as historian, cleaning lady, sleuth, grunt, artist, painter, archivist, and seeker of accoutrements, Shelley Donaho has completed a renovation as stunning as it is historically correct.
Donaho fell in love with the Magic Chef Mansion 26 years ago, and it’s a love affair that continues to this day. “The architecture was so beautiful, as was the setting,” she says.
Charles Stockstrom, founder of the Quick Meal Stove Company—renamed Magic Chef in 1951 —built the house on 2 acres along Russell Boulevard in 1908. His family occupied the house until 1990, when Stockstrom’s daughter, Adda Ohmeyer, died.
Since falling for the house, Donaho has worked to restore it to its original elegance. The payoff is sweet, not in terms of return on investment but instead the knowledge that she’s preserving a treasure for the ages. “We purchased it for $400,000, but I’ve put that much back in many times over,” she says.
Donaho was a young woman with a husband and 3-year-old son when she began the restoration process. Her son, Zane, often free-wheeled his tricycle around the ground floor as his parents tore out plaster, washed walls, scheduled workmen, and lived with chaos and dust.
“I was at the auction when Selkirk’s sold the light fixtures, the furniture, and the contents,” she recalls. “I sat there not knowing I would later buy the house. We bought the dining room chairs and table, with its 16 leaves, for the house we then owned on Longfellow.
“Over time, we bought back four original chandeliers. One had been made into a floor lamp. We pieced it back together. It now hangs in the library,” Donaho says.
“Three years after the Selkirk’s auction, we found the original gilt furniture from the receiving room at an estate sale nearby. We also acquired the oak library chairs.”
In an homage to the house’s namesake, Donaho has outfitted the tiny white-glazed–brick kitchen with 1930s Magic Chef appliances.
She and her husband divorced 10 years ago. Zane now lives in Texas. Still, Donaho persevered and finished the renovation. “For the longest time I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel,” she says. “In 2007, I started on the wrecked bowling alley in the basement, the third floor, and carriage house, and I thought, ‘Well, this is really going to work.’
Donaho now rents the mansion for private events, and in April she began giving scheduled tours on Saturdays. One day, she hopes, the Magic Chef Mansion will be a museum: “This house is art as much as any painting or sculpture. The beauty of it is that nothing had changed; it had been let go, but no walls were added, none were knocked out.”
