Coming Home

Beth Hulfish had always been nostalgic for the Alexandria house where she'd grown up. When she got the chance to reclaim it, she jumped at it.

SOMETIMES A HOUSE TAKES HOLD OF A PERSON AND WON'T LET GO.

For Beth Hulfish, that house is the place where she grew up -- a two-story, L-shaped brick home in the Wilton Woods neighborhood south of Alexandria. Her parents bought it while it was under construction in 1954, two years before she was born. She lived there her entire childhood. But when Beth, the youngest of four, was 18 and about to leave for college, her parents decided it was time to downsize to a smaller place that didn't involve so much yard work. They wanted to move from what Beth's mother always thought of as "the country," and back into the city -- Old Town.

"I didn't really want to leave," Beth says. And she wasn't particularly cooperative about the task, either. She remembers throwing all the clothes she wasn't taking to school with her into a trash bag and tossing the bag in an out-of-the-way space on the fourth floor of the Alexandria townhouse her parents had just purchased. "I didn't even unpack because I really didn't want to move" into the new place, she says. Her mother, not realizing the bag contained Beth's entire spring wardrobe, threw it away.

More than a decade later, as her 20s gave way to her 30s, Beth remained nostalgic for her childhood home. The Wilton Woods house still sat behind a split-rail fence on a sweeping double lot at the elbow of a quiet, suburban road. That broad front yard was the standard against which Beth compared all other houses when she and her husband, Charles, were searching for a place of their own. "I wanted a yard like mine," says Beth, who had spent hours playing kickball and baseball in front of the house with her siblings and friends. The walkway to the front door served as home plate. First base was an azalea, second base a cherry tree, third base a maple.

In 1988, when Beth was pregnant with daughter Stewart, the third of the Hulfishes' four children, she and Charles decided they needed a bigger home to accommodate their expanding family. They made an offer to buy a house in Alexandria's Del Ray neighborhood. While that contract was pending, the couple placed their outgrown Alexandria townhouse for sale.

During a real estate agents' tour of the townhouse, one agent noticed a watercolor of the Wilton Woods house hanging at the top of the stairs. Beth's mother had had the watercolor painted years earlier. Knowing how much Beth loved the house, she'd given the painting to her daughter.

"I think I just listed that house," the agent told Beth, who was amazed to hear that it was on the market. The house had been out of her family's hands for 14 years.

Even though Beth and Charles were already under contract to buy the Del Ray house and hadn't yet sold their townhouse, the couple jumped on the opportunity to bring the Wilton Woods house back into the family -- even if it meant being on the hook, temporarily, for payments on three houses.

"It was kind of like a present," says Charles. "When it became available, we knew immediately we had to buy it."

Beth had kept tabs on the house over the years. She would drive by occasionally to see what had changed. She even rang up her old phone number from time to time, just to see if it still worked. (It didn't.)

Beth's old neighbors in Wilton Woods still referred to the French country-style house as the "Risdon house," after Beth's parents, the late Ed Risdon, a dentist, and Beth's mother, Frances Risdon, a homemaker. "We made the mistake of letting the sellers know Beth was a Risdon," says Charles, who works in commercial real estate. "I think that hurt my negotiating."

To get the house, the Hulfishes had to compete against one other buyer who had been waiting for a house to become available in Wilton Woods. Charles and Beth ended up paying $544,000 for it in 1988, even though Charles estimates it was probably worth only about $400,000. "We paid more than we knew it was worth," Charles says. "I didn't care what the house cost. This was the house Beth wanted, and I thought, if I'm going to live here most of the rest of my life, what do I care what I paid for it?"