Fire damaged a historic house built by iconic Boise architects. Will it be saved?

Tamara Lawrence had driven past the historic white house at 2315 S. Broadway Ave. for what seemed like a million times. After growing up in a similar home, she loved seeing it.

But on Nov. 28, as she drove along Broadway around 10:30 a.m. to a doctor’s appointment, she saw black smoke curling into the cold November air. When she passed the home near Ivywild Park, smoke was pouring out from all four sides of the house and rising.

“The house wasn’t engulfed in flames, but it was definitely on fire,” Lawrence said.

She dialed 911.

A long history in South Boise

Architects designed the front of the house with stones from the Boise River. The front cut an imposing figure over a sizable lawn framed by mature trees typical of a homestead.

Tourtellotte and Hummel, the legendary Idaho architects who designed the Idaho State Capitol, Boise High School and parts of the Old Penitentiary, built the home in 1900. It was known as the Nathan Smith House after the fruit farmer who first lived there. The home earned a spot in the National Register of Historic Places.

The Smiths called their home Fairlawn.

“The Smith house is architecturally significant as the largest and most flamboyant of the Tourtellotte firm’s early shingled colonial-style houses,” according to the register.

The home reportedly cost $3,000 at the time — just shy of $110,000 in today’s dollars.

Smith moved into the house with his wife in September 1900 where, according to Idaho Statesman archives, they hosted dinner parties with members of Boise’s high society such as William Ridenbaugh, who was the president of the city’s first electric company and helped secure a railroad right of way through the city.

“This is a unique building on the colonial style, being a cobble stone building containing modern plumbing appliances and the patent hard-wall plaster now being tried i(n) this vicinity,” reported the Aug. 27, 1900 edition of the Statesman. “Mr. Smith’s plastered walls are perfect, without flaw, and as hard as adamant.”

A family home

Laura Rios remembers it as her grandfather’s house.

The Smiths sold the house to a doctor. Rios’ grandparents bought it in the 1960s or 1970s after saving for a long time, Rios said.

“The house really held a special place for our family… for my entire life,” said Rios, who is now in her 40s and lives in Las Vegas.

When she was in first grade, Rios and her sisters lived at the home for a while. Memories of the old house come easily — like the time Hawthorne Elementary School sponsored their Christmas, and her grandparents got a big tree and put presents everywhere.

She’d ride the little elevator up the stairs to the second floor with her sisters. There was a hitching post for horses out front from generations past. The TV room had the biggest TV she’d ever seen. There were an old pool table and slot machines in the basement.

“It was such a lovely home,” Rios said.

Developing the future

Developers planned to change the home slightly in the coming years as they sought to remove a north-side addition and a porch in back to make way for 15 town houses in three buildings and a single-family home.

Developer David Benoit’s plan would carve out a half-C shape around the home. Developers promised to protect the house.

“It’s one of the first homes designed (by Tourtellotte & Hummel),” said Ben Semple, a landscape architect at Rodney Evans and Partners, during a March 2022 public hearing on the project. “That is not lost on us. We are preserving that home.”

Semple said the developers met multiple times with Preservation Idaho, a nonprofit focused on protecting historical sites, and explored options with Idaho’s State Historic Preservation Office.

“The historic facade of that building will not be changed,” Semple said. “There’s some really cool detailing of the actual facade and the structure that we look forward to preserving and enhancing, with the renovation to be sold as a single-family residential home again.”

The developers said they heard some concerns about the maintenance of the home and the potential for it to be demolished in the future. Semple said just because a home is historic doesn’t mean it can’t be demolished at some point.

Then came the fire.

It started in the basement, when a worker used a battery-powered grinding tool on a wood cabinet, according to Lynsey Amundson, spokesperson for the Boise Fire Department. The flames spread upwards into the crawl space and the first-floor kitchen pantry.

The fire moderately damaged the structure, but Amundson said the home would not need a major renovation, nor was it a complete loss.

Will it be saved?

Semple said in an email that the developers are evaluating everything in the structure and would still build the proposed town houses. He said he did not have any other information about the fate of the home.

David Benoit, the developer, and the property owners did not return calls for comment or emails sent on behalf of the Statesman on what they planned for the home after the fire.

The home was listed for sale on Zillow in May for just under $800,000. The listing was removed four days after the fire.