Southern Accent: Annandale Home Takes a New Identity
The white-columned, front yard sitting porch of 4915 Bradford Drive draws you in. Long and low to the ground, with floral-cushioned wicker rockers and a porch swing, it conjures visions of sipping sweet tea beneath the cool sweep of twin ceiling fans, enjoying the fragrance of summer.
In fact, it’s hard to imagine that this charming, Southern-style home with soft yellow cedar siding and hunter green shutters was once a non-descript, boxy gray clapboard with a shabby front stoop overhang that was barely attached. And that’s just what Florida native Susan Miller intended when she and her husband bought the Brook Hill Estates house in 1999 and began a gradual, five-year renovation to bring home the flavors of her Southern roots.
It wasn’t easy to see the 1962 home’s possibilities. “You really couldn't even see the house from the street, the property was so overgrown,” Miller said. She relates a story of two older ladies from the neighborhood talking about the house: “One said, ‘I didn't get to see it when it was for sale and there was an open house.’ The other replied, ‘I did—I wouldn't live there, and you wouldn't, either!’"