The house at 4712 Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia is a late-Victorian row home built circa 1895: three stories, 16 feet wide, a deep lot running back to a narrow rear yard. The facade is red brick with elaborate terra cotta ornament at the cornice and bay window, a pattern common to the speculative rows that spread through this part of West Philadelphia in the 1890s as the trolley lines extended and the neighborhood became accessible to middle-class families moving out of the crowded city center.
Inside, the house as originally built had a parlor and a sitting room on the first floor, a dining room and kitchen on the second, and three bedrooms on the third — an arrangement that reflected Victorian notions of domestic propriety, with formal rooms closest to the street and private rooms as far from it as possible. By 2023, when its current owners began a full renovation, the house had been subdivided into apartments, de-subdivided back into a single-family, partially renovated at least twice, and had accumulated a century and a quarter of modifications, repairs, and small disasters.
The renovation took fourteen months. What emerged was a floor plan that respected the Victorian bones of the house while making it livable for a twenty-first-century family. Here is how the floor plan changed — and why.
The Problem with the Original Plan
The original parlor-and-sitting-room arrangement on the first floor — two separate enclosed rooms — made sense in 1895, when domestic life was organized around the maintenance of distinct social spaces. It made no sense in 2023, when the owners wanted an open first floor that could accommodate a family of four, guests, and the reality that the kitchen is where everyone actually spends their time.
The challenge was that the wall between the two front rooms was the party wall line — not the shared wall with the neighbor, but the interior bearing wall that ran parallel to it, carrying the floor joists above. Removing it required a steel beam, a structural engineer, and a permit. The owners did all three. The result: a 28-foot-deep first floor open from the front windows to the rear, with the kitchen at the back opening to a deck above the rear yard.
The Stair Relocation
The original stair ran up the party wall side, as is typical of Victorian West Philadelphia rows. It was steep, narrow, and consumed significant floor area on all three levels. The renovation relocated the stair to the center of the plan — a more unusual position, and one that required careful structural coordination — freeing up the party wall side for a continuous run of built-in storage on every floor.
The relocated stair also created a more generous landing at each floor, which in a 16-foot-wide house makes a perceptible difference in how the floor feels. The landing is not wasted space: it functions as a small study area on the second floor and a reading nook on the third.
The Third Floor
The original three-bedroom arrangement on the third floor was preserved in concept but reconfigured in execution. Two bedrooms were consolidated into one larger primary bedroom with a bathroom carved out of the third-bedroom footprint. The primary bathroom — a rarity in a house of this era — occupies what was originally a small rear bedroom, taking advantage of existing plumbing stacks in the party wall.
The third floor also received a new skylight over the stair, which brings natural light down through all three floors — a significant quality-of-life improvement in a house where the middle section gets no direct light from the street or the rear.
What Stayed
The original heart pine floors on the second and third floors were refinished rather than replaced. The plaster walls — where they survived — were repaired rather than replaced with drywall. The Victorian cornice at the parlor ceiling was preserved and, in the living room, restored. The original door hardware was cleaned, re-pinned, and reinstalled.
These decisions were made on principle as much as for cost. The materials that were installed in 1895 — the heart pine, the plaster, the hardware — are better than what would replace them. They also connect the house to its own history in a way that makes the renovation feel like stewardship rather than erasure.
The Result
The renovated Osage Avenue house is a 16-foot-wide, three-story row home that lives like a house twice its apparent size. The open first floor flows from the bay window at the front to the deck at the back. The primary bedroom has daylight from three directions. The built-in storage, distributed across all three floors along the party wall side, handles the organizational demands of a family of four without requiring visible clutter.
It is also, unmistakably, a Victorian Philadelphia row home. The proportions, the materials, the relationship to the street — these have not changed. What changed is the interior logic, updated from 1895 domestic conventions to ones that actually match how people live now. That is the work of a good renovation: not to erase the house, but to make it inhabitable again.