When a Restoration Becomes a Work of Art

Katina Kefalos ran away from her home in Upper St. Clair at the tender age of 17, not expecting she would ever return. Some 36 years later, she not only found herself back in Pittsburgh, but running the family apartment rental business -- something she swore she would never do. Even more surprising to this self-described "black sheep," she has both refurbished the properties and turned them into an homage to her mother, Lillian Kefalos, one of Pittsburgh's most prolific artists.

As a result, visitors to Pittsburgh who rent an apartment from the Kefaloses' Shadyside Rentals (the family is not related to the Kefalos & Associates Real Estate family) can choose from 14 furnished units in three properties that are filled with a lifetime of Lillian's original artwork. Hallways, common areas and individual rooms are decorated and outfitted with her paintings, furniture and sculpture. She has even rather famously painted some of the walls themselves.

And all of this would have been hidden away in a basement if Katina Kefalos had not returned to Pittsburgh in 2004, after more than 30 years away from home.

"I hadn't planned on living here," said Kefalos, an entrepreneur who started a cheesecake business and a national printing business in Ohio after a stint there as a college student. "After 30 years I wanted to heal the relationship, but I looked at the business and at 74 years old, my mother was still cleaning apartments and running to Home Depot. I thought, 'I do not want to do be doing this. I am never going to do this. I am never going to have Mama's life.'"

But within a couple of months, she realized her mother could no longer live alone. So she chose to move into the apartment on South Aiken that they still share, taking on her mother's care and taking over as proprietor of the business. And after about a year, Kefalos said, "I started to have a different outlook. I've grown to appreciate and love and really respect what she's done."

Indeed, the world was a different place for women like Lillian Kefalos, when she was a young wife, mother and budding artist living in Upper St. Clair.

"She started painting in the '60s, when I was in high school, " said Kefalos of her mother, who exhibited her work in the first Shadyside Art Festival more than 40 years ago.

In those days, the family lived in a 1850s farmhouse that's now listed on the Historic Register. When her mother wanted to paint the walls, said Kefalos, she would ask permission of Kefalos' father, John, a chemical engineer. "My father was always very compliant with her," said Kefalos.
 
The family's apartment business was started in the 1960s for reasons which may seem equally antiquated to today's working families.

"My father told mother, 'In case I die, we need to own rental properties so you can live" without having to find a job outside the home, Kefalos said. "It was his hope that by having the properties, she would be able to take care of herself."

And in fact, not many years later, said Kefalos, her father did die. By then, the couple owned the properties on Center and Fifth Avenues and her mother lived on site in one of the apartments, where she continued to devote herself to creating art at a tremendous pace.

"The force of creativity that my mother has been over her lifetime has been astounding, when you see the work that she has produced," said Kefalos.  When she started renovating the apartments, Kefalos said, she found all of Lillian's artwork in the basement of the Fifth Avenue mansion, "stacked six and seven and 12 frames deep, covering every surface," she said.

But Lillian Kefalos did not restrict her artistic focus to painting. She also became quite well known in Pittsburgh for her jewelry -- made from multiple strands of beaded wire, "scrunched" together and welded into necklaces, bracelets, earrings and pins -- which she called "wearable art."

"She was in New York wearing one of her necklaces, and a big-shot designer stopped her and said, 'Could you tell me where you got that necklace?'" Kefalos recounts. "Mama said, 'Well I made it.' The designer featured it in one of her ads. She ended up selling one of the same style necklaces walking down the street in Paris. Up until a couple of years ago, women would still call her about her jewelry."

Lillian also designed and made "outrageous clothes," said Kefalos. "She had a little store called Kaleidoscope, at the corner of Bellafonte and Ivy, where she sold her shawls."

One of her best known paintings does not hang on an apartment wall, however. It *is* the wall. The "Cloud Room" in the dining room of Apartment 5 on Fifth Avenue was written up in a Post-Gazette story. . "She wrote her name in one of the clouds," said Kefalos, who just completed a restoration of the room -- and loves it so much she spent her vacation there.

Lillian also marbleized the walls and fireplaces in the apartment herself. "When the painter came in, he said he couldn't figure out how she'd done it," said Kefalos. "People always think the fireplaces are marble, because they're just so beautiful."

Decorative touches aside, until Kefalos returned, the properties were suffering from neglect.

Part of the problem, said Kefalos, was that her mother had not kept up with the changing rental market in Shadyside, and was charging too little rent to support herself or take care of the units.

"We had a maintenance man for a decade who jury-rigged everything," said Kefalos. "There were wires holding up pipes under the sink."

The apartments were in such disrepair, Kefalos said, that a potential tenant walked into one of the studios, turned on his heel and left, saying it was too depressing.

"I went home and told Mama, we have to do renovations," said Kefalos. "She said, 'When you own them, you can paint.'"

Frustrated, she called her brother. He said, 'Start painting and don't tell her,'" said Kefalos. "After I painted the first apartment in 2005 and replaced the carpet, I raised the rent $300," she said. "When I told Mama she said, 'Paint them all!'"

Under strict orders from Lillian to protect all the custom painting she'd done, Kefalos slowly started restoring the units, starting with paint and later delving into the bigger projects. Today, all but the other side of Aiken Street duplex where mother and daughter reside has been refurbished -- and that is scheduled for a face-lift.  

"By the time we started tearing down the wallpaper in the hallway on Fifth Avenue, I realized, I am living my mother's life," Kefalos said. "But I'm taking it to a new level. I'm creating beauty here in my own way."

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Denise Caruso used to write a tech column for the New York Times and recently moved to Pittsburgh from San Francisco. This is her first article for Pop City.

Photographs copyright Brian Cohen