“When I turned 80,” Andrea Preis said, “our sons told me, ‘It’s time for you and Dad to downsize and move into a place that is more manageable.’ So we did.”
So in 2024, Andrea and husband Eran Preis moved from a four-bedroom home in Queen Village, where they lived for 26 years, to a two-bedroom condo in Bella Vista.
Andrea had no room for her collection of framed embroidery, her cookbooks, art books, albums of photos taken on trips all over the world, dishes, a painted cupboard, and other treasures.
“I had to force myself,” she said, to part with beloved objects. “It made me sick. It was so hard.”
Eran, who gave away stacks of books, was less nostalgic. “We needed to be on one level and our house was starting to fall apart,” he said.
Andrea had a house sale and later set out a table in front of her old home with items people took for free. “When I finally put away the table a woman knocked on the door wondering where everything was,” she recalled.
The couple’s condo comprises the first floor and basement of the three-story rowhouse and was renovated 20 years ago. The ground floor features a sitting area, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom, and a tiny garden. In the basement there is another bedroom, bathroom, and sitting room.
Though she purged half of her furnishings, Andrea kept favorites such as an elaborately carved antique buffet with brass fittings. Over the front door hang vintage Hanukkah oil lamps from Spain and Italy. White painted and exposed brick walls are hung with abstract art.
Several paintings are by Andrea and her son Abner. Her cousin Harriet Quick painted the swirls of green, gold, and orange on a white background.
The sitting area has two blue couches from Macy’s, two leather slingback chairs from a nearby furniture store, and a Persian rug from Material Cultures.
The kitchen’s pumpkin accent wall is decorated with over a dozen artfully arranged plates. Several of them, depicting whimsical women’s faces, were crafted by Andrea, a talented ceramicist and painter. Walnut double doors conceal a commodious pantry.
The queen-sized bed just fits in the bedroom, papered in an oversize leaf pattern. A poster of Henri Rousseau’s Eve in the Garden of Eden continues the leaf motif.
Andrea gave her dining table, which seated 14, to a family of 10. She now uses three folding tables, which seat 12, when she entertains.
One new treasure from previous owners is a photo of the rowhouse when it was Arno & Pagano’s grocery store in the early 1900s.
During the building’s renovation, the exterior cellar door was replaced with a window to add light. Andrea did not want to tend fish in the former owner’s aquarium in the stairwell under the window. She replaced it with an array of fabric dolls in colorful costumes from around the world.
The basement sitting room is furnished with a love seat, two striped chairs, and a pullout couch for visiting family. Andrea and Eran have three sons and four grandchildren.
Bookshelves are filled with travel souvenirs and there is a large television.
Next to Eran’s basement desk hangs a poster for Beyond the Walls, an Israeli movie he cowrote. The prison drama was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1984.
Andrea, who grew up in Akron, Ohio, met Eran in his native Israel when she was living on a kibbutz. They married in 1969 and lived in Israel for 17 years, where Eran was a playwright and screenwriter for Israeli television, theater, and films.
After earning a Master’s in Fine Arts from Ohio University, he taught at Midwestern universities before joining Temple University’s faculty in the late 1990s. He retired as a professor of film and media arts at Temple two years ago.
The couple have a film club with friends. Movie showings in the basement sitting room are followed by refreshments and discussions led by Eran.
“If and when we are no longer able to navigate the stairs,” Andrea said, “we will move the television upstairs and live in our cozy one-floor apartment.”
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