Whitefish couple recognized for home restoration efforts

There are two things Linda Babiak loves: antiques and a good project.

For decades, the Whitefish resident has been blending these passions to restore historic homes in both the Flathead Valley and in Southern California.

Her Montana properties include a pair of Victorians, a bungalow-style home, a Dutch colonial revival and a dam house that once housed workers building the Hungry Horse Dam.

Restoring old homes is an extension of her love of old things, she said, and a means of preserving the architectural roots of the community.

“Some of that stuff they’ve done in downtown Whitefish is beautiful, the new modern buildings, but you’re losing all the old fabric,” Babiak said. “My approach is to buy something that has potential and over time, repurpose it and keep it in the tradition that it was built.”

Her restoration projects range in completion time from multiple years to decades of work. Rather than dive into a house head first, she takes her time, researching options for rehabilitating the structure and scouring antique markets for period-appropriate parts.

The 1911 Dutch Colonial Revival house at 105 Spokane Ave. in Whitefish, which now houses Wheelie Creative, took 10 years to get right. Major improvements included stripping the plywood siding and replacing the metal roof.

The home is also known as the Milo Lent House and has a place on the Historical Walking Tour of Whitefish. It was likely the first home constructed north of the railroad tracks and was built by railroad carpenter Milo J. Lent. The home later housed the local milkman and his five children, before it was sold to the state.

The state originally had plans to demolish the residence, but those never came to pass. The Babiaks purchased the residence in 1996 and have been renting it out ever since.

Part of the joy Babiak gains from restoring old homes in Whitefish is learning about the history of the structures. Take the dam house located at 626 Woodland Place, for example.

“The government built a bunch of houses for the dam workers and see how there’s no eave on the house? That was typical of a dam house. I guess it saved money in the construction,” she explained. “When the dam project was finished they auctioned them off and moved them to various places around the valley.”

Babiak rents out her Whitefish homes as either residential properties or commercial buildings, so they function as investments as well as her creative outlet.

“It’s really satisfying to me to take my own vision of what the property could be, and over time, carry that out,” Babiak said. “You can take an old structure and repurpose it without ruining it.”

But it’s a small, 700-square-foot residence in the coastal city of Long Beach, California that has recently brought attention to Linda and her husband Tim. The couple was selected as the recipients of the 2018 Preservation Award by the nonprofit historic preservation organization, Long Beach Heritage, for their restoration of the family bungalow on 312 Eliot Lane in Long Beach. The Babiaks will receive the award at a March 8 ceremony aboard the historic Queen Mary ship in southern California. The home has been in Linda’s family since 1925.

“Long Beach was called the Iowa by the sea because so many Iowa farmers would go out to Long Beach to winter in the sun. And that’s really how Long Beach got started as a city,” Babiak said. “I had great-grandparents who were among those Iowa farmers that would come out.”

The home was built following a 1923 oil boom on Signal Hill. Laborers moved into the area and needed housing, so developers on Eliot Lane split the lots in two, allowing them to build twice as many homes, albeit smaller in size. Old newspaper clippings advertised the homes as “modern bungalows on easy payments.”

The Eliot Lane home remained in Linda’s family after she and her husband purchased it in the 1970s and began restoration efforts in the early 1990s. Part of the work involved undoing some of her grandparents “remuddling” and bringing the house back to its former glory. She replaced aluminum windows with more traditional frames, refinished the exterior, tiled the roof, and added countless improvements to the home’s infrastructure.

Despite her meticulous efforts, Babiak admits that the selection of such a modest home for the preservation award was a surprise.

“We were a little tract, little one block tract of affordable bungalows among much larger homes, so we’re unique in the neighborhood,” she said. “I think they just wanted something unique to add into the mix, and we’re unique.”

Reporter Mackenzie Reiss may be reached at 758-4433 or mreiss@dailyinterlake.com.