The gilded Italianate mansion has captured attention since the day it was built in 1882 for a wealthy Portland shoe merchant. Original owner Morris Marks lived under gold-leaf ceilings and frescoes with paintings of his face.

After Marks, the house experienced high and low periods. In 1910, it was sliced in half and hauled by horses a half mile, from downtown to Goose Hollow, to be used as apartments.

The once-regal residence then became a restoration project for preservationist Eric Ladd and later an urban retreat for respected landscape architect Wallace Kay Huntington. In the 1960s, Life magazine ran a spread on the lavish lawn parties held on the quarter-acre grounds.

An owner of a law firm repaired some of the elaborate exterior details and replaced a missing west cornice. But since the aging mansion was slated to be used for business, the gardens were replaced with an asphalt parking lot and a labyrinth of offices were created in the back.

The deed changed hands again, and then, in 1997, the property was bought by the Gionets, who could see past the dangerously sagging bay windows, once-glorious walls now covered in inexpensive paneling and an inefficient kitchen to image what it could be ... again.

Now fully restored to its glory days, the Morris Marks House at 1501 S.W. Harrison St. is for sale at $2.75 million.

This four-level mansion is not to be mistaken with the smaller 1880 Morris Marks House that had been boarded up for years and saved from demolition. Its well-publicized move in September 2017 was a news story due to the cost ($440,000), time and effort to relocated it to a vacant lot near the Interstate 405 interchange at Southwest Broadway and Sixth Avenue.

The "little" Morris Marks House is being restored. The larger, second Morris Marks House earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places because so much of the Victorian-era features are original, despite time owned by neglectful landlords.

Walk through glass-paneled double doors -- notice the foliate-patterned transom is still etched with the original "321" address -- and stop to take in the grandeur. Much of the main floor flows from one high-ceiling space to the next, instead of being blocked by a series of walled-off rooms, which was a typical floor plan of the time.

"People say 'whoa', when they first visit," says owner Yvonne Meekcoms, who purchased the property 21 years ago with her husband, Leonard Gionet.

It took almost two years before the family could move in, and even then, the restoration work wasn't complete.

They hired conservation historian Hiawatha Johnson, decorative painter Rachel Hibbard, craftspeople and construction crews to complete a whole house upgrade that included lifting the structure to straighten and reinforce it.

An earth anchor system and steel bars support the now-level house and twin, two-story bay windows.

New plumbing, electrical, air conditioning and heating were installed, and layers of paint were scraped off old-growth Douglas fir.

Painstakingly, the owners removed and re-glazed the original glass windows. Floors too battered to be repaired and refinished were replaced with period-looking cherry wood.

Fortunately, the burl-wood pocket doors, curved grand staircase with hand-carved newel post and staves, and much of the other decorative woodwork has survived.

Egg-and-dart crown molding, as seen in Portland's Pittock Mansion, borders the living room ceiling. The chandelier originally used candles to illuminate the 13-foot-tall space.

The formal dining room has original wainscot and walls painted sky blue with a pattern of gold-stenciled fleur-de-lis. Poised above is a gold-leaf ceiling.

A fresco in the music room depicts musical instruments and garlands. The Gionets expanded the space to include an enclosed sun porch that opens to a new brick patio.

Remaking the mansion wasn't easy. Leonard Gionet notes that a jack that could lift 60 tons broke down trying to elevate the house.

"That's a lot of lathe and plaster," jokes Gionet, who lived with his wife in a modern house, with floor-to-ceiling windows, on five acres near Northwest Skyline Boulevard before moving to this old house closer to town.

He said the "labor of love" project was like falling down a rabbit hole. "To bring this house back to the splendor of 1882, you had to correctly redo the ceiling, ruined woodwork, doors, floors, handles," he says, trailing off.

Meekcoms recalls Hibbard was lying on a scaffolding platform, scraping paint from the ceiling -- "paint chips were falling on her face," adds Gionet -- and the time Hibbard uncovered concealed painted scenes leading up the staircase. The images were "a storybook as you went along," says Meekcoms.

Also preserved were original painted faces representing ancient Romans and the Marks family.

Listing agent Michele Bowler-Failing of Bowler-Failing Property/The Agency Realtors relied on historians to help track down the home's story. Still there are gaps. But that's to be expected in a 136-year-old house.

Steve Maker and Harvey Freer, co-owners of Painting Restoration Studio and Harvey & Steve's Gallery in Portland's Pearl District, were longtime friends of the late historian-preservationist Eric Ladd.

They remember visiting Ladd at the mansion in the 1960s.

At the time, Ladd had long been advocating for protecting landmark houses and the ones that he couldn't help save, he salvaged sections and pieces -- floor tiles, wall paneling, statues, light fixtures, doorknobs, even complete cast-iron fronts -- and incorporated them in restoration projects.

Ladd, whose birth name was Leslie Carter Hansen, helped save the Pittock Mansion -- he lived in the 1914 French Renaissance Revival-style chateau for several years in the late 1950s -- and more than 25 other historic Portland buildings.

He paid $1,000 for the condemned Jacob Kamm House, built in the early 1870s for the Oregon Steam Navigation Co. magnate on the site of what's now Lincoln High School. After Ladd relocated the mansion to a two-acre tract at Southwest 20th Avenue and Jefferson Street that he named the Colony, lived there while running a restaurant before moving into the 1882 Morris Marks House.

Part of the past was installed here: The original servant kitchen was replaced by the intricate kitchen and pantry saved from the 1882 Richard B. Knapp mansion, which was dismantled in the 1950s.

The entire intact kitchen, which includes cabinetry and stained-glass windows, was profiled in a column by New York Times' food editor and restaurant critic Craig Claibourne and photos of it appeared in the Northwest volume of the Time-Life cookbook series.

Since Meekcoms and Gionet were updating the mansion during the restoration, they made the kitchen more functional by moving a small copper sink to a powder room and installing a double sink in the center of granite counters.

They also added an eight-burner Viking stove, Sub-Zero refrigerator and stainless-steel surfaces. Custom hardware was made to match the existing brass drawer pulls and hinges, and a ladder made of matching wood is used to access high cupboards.

The kitchen has a passageway to the dining room through the butler's pantry.

The Gionets hired Wallace Huntington of Huntington & Kiest to return to his former home and re-create a second garden.

Authors William F Willingham and William John Hawkins of the "Classic Houses of Portland, Oregon: 1850-1950" book refer to the 1882 Morris Marks House as "the most exceptional double-bayed Italianate house remaining in Portland" out of hundreds of mansions built in the style. Bowler-Failing's research found that the house is the finest example of Italianate architecture north of San Francisco.

Still, when new, the home was modest compared to towering mansions constructed in the 1880s on Portland's fashionable Park Blocks. Morris Marks' wife was particularly impressed by her sister's estate built for Oregon City mill owner Isaac Jacobs.

The Marks' twice hired the Jacobs' architect, Warren Heywood Williams, to design a less expensive version; first the 1880 Morris Marks house with a single polygonal bay, then the larger mansion two years later.

Both houses were inspired by Renaissance palazzos and have classic Corinthian-style porch columns. Both have been moved at least once.

Now that the Gionets are empty nesters, they find that living in a 7,238-square-foot structure is too much. They're hoping another family will move in and continue to add to the mansion's fascinating story.

-- Janet Eastman



jeastman@oregonian.com

503-799-8739

@janeteastman