Sometimes your forever home isn’t in its forever spot. Take 5214 Live Oak St. When the red brick Prairie Four-Square was built in 1920, it sat on Bryan Street, near Beacon. But two decades later, in the 1940s, Live Oak expanded. So, “they picked the house up and moved it over into its current location,” listing agent Becky Oliver says.
The house has stayed put ever since. Part of the Swiss Avenue Historic District, “it has a lot of the same lovely attributes that you find on Swiss Avenue,” Oliver says. The house has many of its original features, like the windows, doors, hardware, and hardwood floors. It has plenty of space, too—the 3,080-square-foot house’s new lot on Live Oak is 281 feet deep.
Like many Old East Dallas homes, it lived as a boarding house from the 1950s through the late ‘70s, when it was converted back to single-family. In 2012, the original roof was destroyed during a hailstorm, and it took the then-owners two years to find a replacement that could match the original style.
Those owners also conducted an 11-month renovation in 2016 and 2017. It was “quite extensive,” Oliver says. They converted the original parlor into a formal dining room. They moved the kitchen, turning the old space into a family room, and built a mudroom, laundry, and pool bath downstairs. Upstairs, they added the primary suite, with a large primary bath.
“I think when the addition was made, it really had the modern family in mind,” Oliver says. But the then-owners put effort into maintaining the “elegance and richness of an older home.” For example, they kept original features, like the sconces in the dining room, and matched new details, like the crown molding, to the home’s original architecture.
As a result, the home still “feels like a 1920s house,” Oliver says.
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