The Saratoga City Council on Nov. 5 voted to strip two houses of their heritage resource designations. The houses are located at 14650 Sixth St. and 19050 Camino Barco.
“This isn’t something I take lightly, removing it from that heritage resource, because I think it’s a really valuable thing we do as a city, and in general, that our residents work very hard to maintain,” said Mayor Belal Aftab of one of the designation terminations.
The house at 14650 Sixth St. is known as the Nardie house and was built in the Queen Anne style. It was added to the city’s Heritage Resource Inventory in 1988 because it met two of the listed criteria in the municipal code: embodying distinctive characteristics of style, type, period or method or construction and being a valuable example of the use of indigenous materials.
Homeowners Ismar and Kristin Maslić applied to remove the property from the Heritage Resource Inventory in February because they felt that their renovations diluted any historical significance of the house. They argued that the house’s relocation in 1925, six blocks away from its original location on Oak Street and Saratoga-Los Gatos Road, detached it from its historical context. They also said that previous modifications, like alterations to the porch and raising the house to accommodate a four-car garage, distanced it from authentic design.
The Maslićs said that they would try to maintain the Queen Anne Victorian aesthetic of the house through their use of colors and materials and by preserving and restoring existing details when possible. However, they planned additional modifications, including the addition of a one-car garage and conversion of the four-car garage into an accessory dwelling unit.
“The structure simply no longer possesses the historical integrity,” Ismar Maslić said at the city council meeting.
In July, the Heritage Preservation Commission rejected their request to remove the property from the Historic Preservation Inventory because commissioners felt the house still met the criteria for the inventory. The applicants appealed the decision to the Planning Commission and conducted a third-party historical resource evaluation. In September, the Planning Commission recommended the removal of the Nardie house from the inventory.
The house “retains a low level of integrity for association with Queen Anne design,” the evaluation said. “It does not retain integrity of location and setting, and a low to moderate levels of integrity of materials, workmanship, feeling and association.”
The second house that was removed from the inventory, located at 19050 Camino Barco, was added to the inventory in 1999 in part because it contributed to “unique physical characteristics representing an established and familiar visual feature of a neighborhood or district within the city,” based on Saratoga’s historic resource designation criteria. The property owner applied to remove the property from the Historic Resource Inventory in June, saying the original house was demolished the same year it was added to the inventory, but city records didn’t record a demolition. The commissioners reviewed current pictures of the home and determined that it did not meet the criteria for designation, and the commission recommended removing the property from the inventory.