Crumbling Wichita mansion is finally refurbished, finds new life as sober living house

One of Wichita’s most recognizable historic mansions has for years looked more like a creepy haunted house than a cherished part of Wichita’s history. It’s been looted. It’s been vandalized. Within the past decade, someone even tried to set it on fire.

But those who’ve driven past the 1886 Sternberg Mansion at 1065 N. Waco lately have noticed that it looks almost new again. There’s no more broken glass. The house has new storm windows. And — most noticeably — it’s gotten a fresh coat of paint: white with gray trim.

The mansion, which during its 138 years of life has at various times served as a private residence, a boarding house, and a weekend handyman project, now has a new purpose.

It’s been owned since December 2022 by Pepin Suter, a local contractor and home remodeler whose specialty is kitchens and basements. He paid $125,000 for the house and spent nearly two years and $450,000 fixing it up, both inside and out. Recently, he opened it as his second local How It Works sober living house and has dubbed the home, which features 5,216 square feet of living space, “Waco Mansion.” He says it can accommodate up to 14 men in recovery, and the house, which has five bedrooms and four bathrooms, already has two residents.

Suter, 50, is a history buff and fan of old houses who says he’s always loved the Sternberg Mansion. He said he’s driven by the house for at least 15 years and always felt envious of whoever owned it, even if it was in shambles.

A lifelong Wichita resident, Suter started his own framing business when he was 23 years old. But by his late 30s, he was addicted to alcohol and drugs, which he says ruled his life. He was in and out of jail.

Suter finally got sober seven years ago, and he credits his recovery to Oxford House , a national organization that runs sober living houses across the country. When he finally decided to get clean, Suter said, he found himself in a Wichita Oxford House, where he stayed for two years, thriving under the fellowship and support.

The experience saved his life, Suter said, and it allowed him to start over. Now, he’s the owner of a successful business, Pepin Suter Remodeling , which he started in 2017. And he feels called to help others who are struggling with addiction.

“I’ve seen how well Oxford works for people. I see more success out of sober living houses than I do anything else related to recovery,” he said. “...My thought was get this house, turn it into a sober living house, then I get to have a mansion and also have a part in other people recovery, which I really enjoy that. I’m passionate about it. It changed my life completely.”

Victorian masterpiece

The Sternberg Mansion, which today sits across the street from a strip center that contains Juarez Mexican Bakery and Molino’s Mexican Cuisine , is a Queen Anne Victorian that was originally built by William H. Sternberg, one of Wichita’s most notable builders during its early boom days. Sternberg, a New York transplant, also was responsible for building the Sedgwick County Courthouse and more than 100 other houses and businesses throughout the city.

He built the home at 1065 N. Waco as his own residence but also as a model that would showcase his abilities. The house, which had 14 rooms and four fireplaces, was characterized by its many porches, its intricate “gingerbread” detailing, its stained glass windows, its soaring chimneys and its peaked roof. Sternberg is said to have lived in the home for only four years.

In 1920, the mansion was converted into a boarding house and served as one for decades. Eventually, a local businessman proposed demolishing it and nearby houses to make way for an apartment complex.

But in 1975, Wichita’s Urban Renewal Agency decided that the house had enough historical and architectural significance that it should be protected. The agency — which hoped to demonstrate how historical homes could be saved — bought the house for $11,200 and spent $52,000 rehabbing it. It even performed paint chip analysis in an effort to repaint the house in its original colors.

In 1976, the agency put the house up for sale, setting the minimum bid price at $55,000 and stipulating that the buyer would be responsible for bringing the house’s plumbing, wiring and mechanical equipment up to code.

In June of 1977, local lawyer David Dewey and his wife, Sally, bid $30,000 — far under the original asking price — and purchased the home to live in with their five children. With help from loans, they undertook a major renovation of the house’s interior, removing the temporary walls that had been put up when the house was used as apartments and wallpapering its many rooms.

The Sternberg mansion was designated as a local historic landmark in 1976, and in 1989, it finally was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Deweys, who had occasionally let the public tour their home — usually for fundraisers — put the house up for sale in 1993, asking $240,000. They’d loved the house, they said, but all but one of their children had grown up and left home, and they wanted to downsize.

The couple didn’t find a buyer until 1998, and that owner lived in the house only a short time. In 2004, Wichita State University employee Ken Elliott bought the house and moved in, telling the Wichita Eagle that he planned to turn the first-floor parlors into a mini-museum that would be open to the public. He’d live on the third floor, he said, and would also rent the house out for receptions and meetings. Eventually, Elliott turned to crowdfunding to help him with renovations, but the bank foreclosed on him.

The house sat empty until Brad Dody, who owned a construction company, bought it in 2016 . Over the years, Dody said, the home had been frequently vandalized and looted. But he wanted to save it. He worked on it off and on over the years — most significantly repairing the foundation — then sold it to Suter.

“I saw the for-sale sign outside one day and just thought I would ask,” Suter said. “And then I came in and looked at it, and I fell in love with it. Normally I’m very decisive on things like this. It took me a little bit of thinking — at least a day — to decide whether I wanted to take this on because I knew it would be a huge challenge. And it was.”

‘I want to fix everything’

When Suter walked into the house for the first time, he was confronted by many sad realities. Nearly all of the original wood floors were gone, and many of the home’s most intricate original details — including one of its grand fireplaces — had been either stolen by vandals or taken out by previous owners.

But he saw the potential in the place, which still had the wallpaper Sally Dewey hung. (And, despite some peeling, it was in pretty good shape.)

Suter, who qualified for a $90,000 grant, worked to protect the house’s remaining details. Inside, he found that the only remaining wood floors were in the dining room, so he put down laminate wood floors throughout the first floor.

He restored the original windows, redid sagging ceilings, repaired walls, and put the kitchen back together. He redid the bathrooms, put new carpet upstairs, installed a new HVAC system, put in new plumbing and replaced missing basement bearing walls.

He rebuilt the termite-damaged second-floor balcony that faces Waco and recreated pieces of the missing gingerbread trim.

“I want to fix everything,” he said. “But you can’t fix everything.”

The house still has its huge formal parlor, music room, detailed wood trim, massive pocket doors and intricate U-shaped staircase, and Suter had those all thoroughly cleaned. He put beds and dressers in most of those rooms, as well as in the five bedrooms on the second floor and in the giant third-floor ballroom space. The house also features a small fourth-floor room with a window that opens to provide sweeping views of north Wichita, its many grain elevators and Via Christi Hospital. But it’s empty for now; the stairs that lead up to it are too steep.

When he bought the house — and his other sober living house at 918 N. Stratford — he planned to renovate them and offer them to Oxford House. But the properties didn’t fit their specifications.

So he decided to open his own sober living houses and rent space to men who were serious about getting clean. At the Waco Mansion, which is run by a house manager, he’s charging $200 a week — a tier above the $100-$130 that most recovery places go for.

“This is not a halfway house, and it’s not for low bottom people that just have to fill a requirement,” he said. “I want people to live here who want to change and want to reap the benefits of sobriety.”

While working on the house, Suter said, he became obsessed with its history and read everything he could find about Sternberg, Dewey and anyone else who had been associated with it over the years.

For a brief moment, he was tempted to live in the mansion, but Suter is a “minimalist” he said, and he couldn’t justify it.

So far, he’s encountered only a little resistance from a neighbor who was against his plans for turning the mansion into a sober living house, he said. And on social media, he found a post that criticized him for his exterior paint choice, calling it “monochromatic.”

But he can live with that.

“I don’t mind that. I appreciate it. And I can relate. I can understand that,” he said. “If I had my way, I would fix it up just the way it was, exactly. I love this place.”