Merion Village duplex built to look like vintage German Village cottage, with 7,000 books

Guy Marshall recently bought about 7,000 books, but he acknowledges he's not much of a reader.

The books are part of his unconventional home development, a new Merion Village duplex designed to look like an old German Village cottage and furnished with reclaimed and vintage materials.

Iron works salvaged from Indiana. Bookshelves fashioned out of scrap lumber from Habitat for Humanity's ReStore. Barn beams from Facebook Marketplace. Vintage refrigerator hardware from an Indonesian company off Etsy. Library ladders from Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace and ReStore. Eight-foot interior doors from an 1800s hotel.

"I got a lot off Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, Etsy and Habitat's ReStore," said Marshall.

Including about 7,000 hardcover books, Marshall said. They stack, floor to 12-foot ceiling, throughout the house.

"I bought them off a Dayton kid who buys them in bulk for a penny apiece," Marshall said. "I paid him 10 cents a book."

Marshall and his three daughters spent weekends sorting the books by color to decorate the house. The volumes also supply the property's name - The Book House.

Marshall got the idea for The Book House a few years ago.

A contractor for 15 years, Marshall runs Creative Bath Renovations, a high-end bath remodeling firm but wanted to do something on his own, following his own design muse. He decided to build a duplex that could be rented out, Airbnb style, and used books as the home's theme.

He bought a lot four years ago on West Markison Avenue, in a sliver of Merion Village that extends west of South High Street — not the trendiest part of Merion Village but one Marshall says is on the rise.

"The area's just gentrifying overnight, so many restaurants are popping up," he said. "Almost all the houses on the street been flipped, there's a lot of investment in the area."

After securing the lot, Marshall got to work on his dream.

He wanted the home to look like it had been there for generations.

"If you think this building is from the turn of the century, I've done my job," he said.

To add to the effect, Marshall sought vintage materials from unconventional sources, a scavenger search but one that paid off in the long run.

"If you paid full price for this stuff, I don't know how much you'd pay - maybe $300,000?" he wonders.

Those items that weren't vintage were made to look so. New wood floors were "shiny, perfect," until Marshall and his crew got to work on them.

"We spent a day beating up the floor, nicking it, scratching it," he said.

Instead of walls of solid brick, like original German Village cottages, Marshall laid 12-inch concrete block meant to look like brick and filled the gaps with foam insulation.

Materials he couldn't buy he built, such as four queen murphy beds in the lower level designed to look like old card catalogs when raised into the wall. Each side of the mirror-image duplex includes three bedrooms and sleeps 12, including eight in the murphy beds. Including the lower level, the duplex includes 4,600 square feet, 2,300 on each side.

Behind the home are modest yards with seating areas and a garage.

Even after resourcefully reclaiming a lot of the material, Marshall estimates that the duplex cost about $1 million to build. Instead of managing it himself, he has decided to try to sell it, perhaps to a company that specializes in short-term rentals. He expects to ask $1.8 million to $1.9 million.

"I'm not in the hospitality industry," he said. "I don't know that business. I'm a contractor."

jweiker@dispatch.com

@JimWeiker

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Merion Village duplex built to look like vintage German Village cottage, with 7,000 books