(Below in italics is from the National Register listing; not verified for accuracy by this author.)
Carefully detailed one-and-one-half-story, brick-veneered Colonial Revival style house built late 1930s. Three large gable-roofed dormers with molded box cornices and returns pierce the front of the slate roof; each contains a round-arched window with keystone flanked by pilasters. Large entrance porch on clustered Tuscan columns shelters front door surrounded by sidelights and sunburst lunette. W. Ernest Byrd, partner in Byrd Brothers & Pickett, feed dealers on Morgan St., lived here many years beginning in late 1930s.
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The house is first listed in the 1939 Durham city directory. It was designed by Rose & Rose, Architects and built for William Ernest Byrd, Sr. and his wife Myrtle Leigh Byrd.
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from A Home in the City: The Trinity Park Fall Home Tour, October 16, 1983:
1015 Monmouth Avenue
Helen and Peter Keese's home, located at 1015 Monmouth Avenue, offers a combination of comfortable living amidst beautiful architectural features. The Dutch Colonial house is constructed of red brick with a slate roof. Though it is only forty-five years old, it boasts ten foot ceilings, double-sized entries off the center hall, and archways reminiscent of an earlier period.
The home was built in 1938 by the noted Durham architect J. P. Rose for the W. E. Byrds; it remained in the Byrd family for almost forty years. In 1977 the home was sold to a young couple who did an interior "face lift." The Keeses bought the home in 1980. It is the second home they have owned in Trinity Park.
Although the home has yet to undergo major renovation (the kitchen is still "original") it demonstrates how a modern family can live in such a gracious past.
Throughout the home Helen displays her watercolors she sells. The paintings are intermingled with the many antiques they have collected or inherited over the years.
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