Condo To Go

A Springfield couple at the edges of retirement downsized to a luxurious condo to make their wintertime getaways to Florida that much easier.

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Finding themselves in a time when they didn’t want to live with the fuss of maintaining a big house, Kira Blasi and Arch Watson have made it their goal to spend half the year together in Springfield and half the year together in Florida.

To accomplish this task, what they needed was a hotel room-plus. They did not need a big house. They had already done the big-house thing when they raised their respective families, and now their big houses are up for sale. They did not want to bother with the upkeep of a big place, and they did not want to worry about leaving a too-grand home unoccupied for months on end while they were in Florida.

Their solution? Purchasing a duplex condo in a leafy, compact development on Springfield’s east side. The new place is about 3,000 square feet—big enough to be spacious and gracious, small enough to be manageable.

The catch? The condo they found last March was about 30 years old and generally in need of updating from top to bottom. Kira and Arch engaged Jeanne Waters Hill, of Springfield-based Touché Designs, to spiffy the place up. (Jeanne is known for her work on projects including the Ann and Jim Stafford home profiled in these pages in 2003, as well as coordinating the interior design of the Titanic museum in Branson.)

Kira says Jeanne’s general reaction was “okay, there’s a lot to do here,” when she first visited. The primary priority on the lot-to-do list was remaking the condo’s main walking spaces. Instead of a cramped foyer opening to a cramped hallway on the main floor and a chute-like stairway to the lower floor, Jeanne took the dining room and the front room of the house and removed that narrow hallway so the rooms would open directly into the foyer and, hence, the front door. At last, visitors to the condo could see light and space the moment they set foot in the home... and at last, that front room was a space worthy of being enjoyed. It became the room that Kira calls her study.

With a little remodeling, the chute-like staircase went from uncomfortable—the ceiling barely accommodated Kira and Arch’s stature—to borderline lofty, at least within the context of a not-over-the-top duplex condo. Flanked by new pillars, the new staircase contains a chandelier that doesn’t so much as graze anyone’s head—far from it. At the bottom of the stairs, an artificial fireplace makes for an eye-catching focal point.

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