ALL IN THE DETAILS: George Oliphant, wife Zoe and boys George III, 4, Bode, 2, and Leo, 1, live in this 5,000-square-foot house featuring original details including beamed ceilings and working fireplaces. (Lorenzo Ciniglio/Freelance)
Beamed ceilings and working fireplaces. (Lorenzo Ciniglio/Freelance)
The master bedroom (above) — one of the home’s six bedrooms — is on the second floor and has a headboard that belonged to Oliphant’s grandparents. (Lorenzo Ciniglio/Freelance)
The marble angels (above) wrestling on the mantel (Lorenzo Ciniglio/Freelance)
On his NBC show “George to the Rescue,” George Oliphant and his team of builders and decorators come to the aid of homeowners in need. He could have used some of that help when he moved to Upper Montclair, NJ, more than a decade ago.
Oliphant was 24, fresh out of college, and the plan was to move temporarily into what had been his grandparents’ home until he could afford an apartment of his own in Manhattan. His family held a Christmas Eve party in the English Tudor house every year after his grandparents moved into it in 1945. But nobody lived in it anymore.
“It was January 2000,” Oliphant recalls, “and the first thing that happened was a flood. I walked in and discovered that the ceilings of several rooms had collapsed. Someone had left the third-floor bathroom window open in a terrible cold snap. The pipes burst, and I had water dripping down for three weeks. It was a mess!”
But the house was without a doubt magnificent. Built nearly a century ago, it measured 5,000 square feet with three stories (plus a basement) and was set on an acre of land. The sconces that dotted the walls were still burning gas when Oliphant first arrived. After the flood, he had them electrified.
In fact, he did many things to overhaul the nearly 100-year-old house.
“I spent 2000, 2001, up until October 2002 in this house,” he says. “And during that time, I was able to get a lot of things done. I learned so much about maintenance and repair and working with a house that’s not new construction.”
Oliphant moved to the city in 2002, where he met and married Zoe Colton Simpson and settled in Brooklyn Heights. Meanwhile, the Montclair house stayed in the family; Oliphant’s parents and other friends lived there for a while; later, it was rented out.
By the time Zoe was pregnant with the couple’s second child, they knew they needed more space. So in November 2009, they decided to move to Montclair and into Oliphant’s grandparents’ home.
The family — which includes sons George III, 4, Bode, 2, and Leo, 1 — now have plenty of room to spread out in the six-bedroom, three-plus-bathroom house. There are two sun porches (one on the ground floor, the other on the second floor just off the master bedroom), a foyer, a living room, a dining room, a butler’s pantry, a study, a laundry room, a billiards room, a wine cellar (where Oliphant stores his tools), plus an attached carriage garage (once used for horse carriages) and a separate car garage on the grounds.
And the rooms feature beautiful, original details: ornate woodwork, walnut paneling, three working fireplaces, beamed ceilings, built-in bookcases, a cathedral ceiling in the study and — throughout the house — leaded glass windows, leaded transoms, French doors and two stained-glass windows.
As far as furnishings went, Oliphant relied on (and still relies on) several pieces that once belonged to his grandparents: a piano with missing keys, a leather couch and matching chair, the headboard for the bed in the master bedroom. He also inherited some items from friends — a blue couch, a leather chair, a coffee table and the kitchen’s butcher-block island — and added others, like the bunk beds in George and Bode’s shared bedroom, from his childhood home in Steamboat Springs, Colo.
And he began what sometimes seems like an endless battle to restore and update the house.
Oliphant is working from the original 1914 blueprints. “I figure that back then it took about a year to build a house,” he says. “So 2015 should be the house’s 100th anniversary. I’m hoping to finish by then.”
He still has to put on a new roof and gutters, restore the billiards room, strip the wallpaper from the guest room and then paint it, convert a hallway into a library, put in window treatments throughout the house, finish modernizing the bathrooms (he has two more to go), landscape and pave the driveway.
“The next step will be doing the kitchen,” Oliphant says. “I probably won’t be able to get to that until the fall, or maybe the spring of 2014. It’s a big job, an expensive job and labor-intensive. So that makes it difficult.”
And though his grandparents paid just $17,500 for the house, by 2015, when he finishes the work, Oliphant calculates that he will have spent more than $250,000 restoring it to its original grandeur.
And all the while, he’s also restoring the homes of people on his TV show, which airs on NBC 4 New York and nine other NBC-owned stations around the country.
“ ‘George to the Rescue’ came about when a friend came up with the idea for a show called ‘Open House,’ ” Oliphant says. “I did a segment talking about home improvement. Then we started ‘Open House to the Rescue’ in 2008. We’d help homeowners with their small home-improvement dilemmas.”
That snowballed and in 2010 grew into “George to the Rescue”; it’s now back for a fourth season (Saturdays at 10 a.m. on NBC and Saturdays at 7 p.m. on Cozi TV), and this one is mainly dedicated to helping families who were devastated by Superstorm Sandy.
“That experience I had in my house, when it flooded and I didn’t know what to do, taught me to make sure we do everything right on ‘George to the Rescue,’ ” he says. “I don’t ever want a homeowner to be in the situation I was stuck in.”
Oliphant also will have a new show on Cozi TV (date to be announced) called “Meal Estate”; he’ll be exploring the décor, ambiance and cuisine of some of the nation’s most famous restaurants. And between seasons, even when “George to the Rescue” is not on, Oliphant does segments on “Open House.”
Now all he has to do is find the time to finish the work on his own house.
“It’s not easy living in a house that’s always being worked on,” says Zoe. “It can be stressful, but it can also be fun. We bought white grass cloth for some of the walls, and everyone thought we were crazy. With three boys under 5, the day has to come when they’ll get out magic markers and start drawing on it. But then George will just go down to the storeroom, cut out more grass cloth, and patch it up.”
George Oliphant’s
favorite things
* The wall-to-wall leaded glass windows in the sun porch
* His grandparents’ piano from the 1940s
* His great-grandfather’s circa-1800 stand-up desk from Havana
*His great-great-great-grandfather’s powder keg (from 1813), back when people carried powder kegs to fill their muskets with gunpowder.
* The marble angels wrestling on the mantel
*A painting of his grandfather in a kilt
* The butler’s pantry with its own copper sink and a wooden bar
* Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle signed baseballs
*His grandmother’s dinner bell