Every week, our House Calls feature takes you into homes with great style, big personality, and ineffable soul. Today we look at the Denver, Colorado home of Larry Sykes and Sarah Hernandez. When the couple bought this place, their first home, Sykes, who is a designer at the noted firm Arch11, took on the tasks of redesigning and rebuilding the 116-year-old unit. The sometimes challenging project has, in his words, "most definitely made him better" at his job. In 2013, the challenging Denver housing market meant that Larry Sykes and Sarah Hernandez were likely going to be buying a fixer. Simultaneously taking on a first home and a big project would be a daunting task for many, but this couple (mostly) welcomed the opportunity. "We saw some homes in our price range where a lot of things had been done already," Sykes says. "But, from my perspective, they were not very good things. We were open to places that needed a lot of work." In Hernandez?s view, fixing up a home made financial as well as artistic sense. "[Larry] was previously in a situation akin to being a painter who had never had a blank canvas," she says. Her biggest worry was that their new lives could end up mirroring the 1980s comedy, The Money Pit.

Although this duplex was built in 1900 and has some Victorian details, it attracted Sykes because it was "basically a box."

The fear was understandable. "A lot of the old houses in Denv...