Historic Oakwood Old Schoolhouse, walk downtown!

Come and stay in our house located in the Historic Oakwood District. Walk two blocks to Person Street and find doughnuts, bakeries, a bottle shop, pharmacy, several restaurants and bars, art galleries, and bookstore. You'll find BBQ, a sandwich restaurant, and other shops within the neighborhood. Venture out a little further (0.5-1.5 miles) and you'll be exploring Raleigh's Warehouse District, Moore Square, Fayetteville Street, Glenwood South, etc.

You're looking at a 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms house.

Upstairs, you'll find a piano, high ceilings, and a recently remodeled kitchen and bathroom. The master bedroom has a king sized bed and the living room has a sleeper sofa.

Downstairs, the bedrooms are flexible to your needs:
- Do you have a lot of guests? Pull down the queen sized Murphy bed in one room and/or pull out the twin sized trundles that are underneath the full sized beds in the other two rooms. In other words, downstairs can sleep up to 8 people.
- Do you need a place to work? Put the Murphy bed up and use the guest room as an office instead.

When you're ready for some fresh air, walk outside the kitchen to a screened-in back porch. Or go downstairs and you'll be in the back yard with a fire pit.

Got a dog? She/he will also enjoy the back yard, which includes a kennel. There is also a dog park just a few blocks away. We do charge a $50 nightly pet fee and ask that you keep pets off of the furniture.

You will also find a game room in the back yard, which has a TV and combination foosball/air hockey/tennis table. There is also a futon for watching movies or sleeping al fresco.

You are also welcome to use the laundry room.
Guest access
You will have the whole house to yourself, except for a few locked owners closets. We will send you a door code with the check in information.
Other things to note

We thank Matthew Brown, a friend, neighbor and historian for preserving the "Cinderella Story" of our house:

Welcome to 620 N. East St. This house has a Cinderella story. It all started in 1899 when Joseph Heilig, who was an engineer for the Seaboard Air Line Railroad, built his house at 501 Polk St. Just a few years later, Heilig decided to move his house just one lot over and face its front door towards the corner of Polk and N. East streets and renumber it 504 N. East St. This allowed him to build a new house at 504 Polk St. Keeping his original kitchen didn’t fit into these plans for some reason, so he got rid of it in and sent it two blocks down the street to the lot where it is today.

In 1912, the kitchen was placed on tall brick piers where it now stands by J. Stanhope Wynne, former mayor of Raleigh and president of the Home Real Estate Company. Wynne brought in a former school house from Johnston County and attached it to the kitchen, making the resulting structure a residence. This upgrade was enough to entice Horace T. Roberts, a dairy farmer in the area to buy the property for $1,150 on August 7, 1913. However Roberts couldn’t make his payments, so the house was auctioned off in 1916 for $850 to W. J. Young. Young was active at the Methodist church downtown on Edenton street and later founded the Raleigh Y.M.C.A chapter.

Over the next 60 years, the housed struggled to find its identity. It was occupied by at least 15 different people, including a painter, salesman, cabinet maker, truck driver, and a baker. There is rumor that the Methodist Orphanage occupied or owned the house in the 30s and 40s. Then it was sold in 1979 for $10,500 to Daniel C. Pope, who used it for storage for the next 10 years.

After almost a century of waiting to someday be uplifted, the residence at 620 N. East St. was sold to Davis and Karin Jones in 1986 for $40,000. They were the perfect couple for this house: he enjoyed working on house remodeling projects, and she was an artist with the gift of design skills. Together they developed plans to revitalize and add four bedrooms and two bathrooms to the house. They shared their vision for the house with the public the next year as they put the house on the Oakwood Candlelight Tour in 1987. After several years of hard work, the Jones’s vision became a reality as 620 N. East St. Became a house large enough for a family. Sadly, when their daughters were one- and three-years old, Karin died from cancer and Davis subsequently sold the house in 1996. Eight years later another family whose mother was an artist bought the house. Roxane Lessa further refined the house’s vibrant design by completing several projects. Some walls were knocked down, the kitchen ceiling was raised, many of the rooms were painted with bright colors, and a screened-in porch was added on to the rear of the house.

In 2012 Clint and Kathryn Stevenson, who both work at NC State, bought the house at the beginning of their marriage. They love this house and have made this house their own. Most recently, they renovated the kitchen and master bathroom. They also built a game room underneath the back porch and converted the basement underneath the original school house into a workshop where Kathryn does woodworking and Clint keeps his home brewing equipment.