Jennie Dotts is sitting in the perfectly appointed living room of a restored 1894 Queen Anne home, once a burned-out shell that was condemned in the 1970s.

The gray stone Grove Avenue house, owned and restored by Dotts' sister Jeanne Bridgforth, is a metaphor for Dotts' preservation career. It's also an example of what the Richmond native hopes to accomplish in a new venture aimed at helping homeowners tackle restoration.

Dotts left her post as executive director of the Alliance to Conserve Old Richmond Neighborhoods (ACORN) last May after seven years of helping save decrepit homes. She recently started the Web-based Old House Authority with her husband of 3½ years, Walter Dotts, and Dixon Kerr, a window-restoration expert and one of ACORN's founders.

The site, www.oldhouseauthority.com, gives homeowners access to Dotts' vast Rolodex of restoration experts, offers consultations on old-house renovation, and sells products such as invisible storm windows that are historically accurate, aesthetically pleasing and energy efficient. Through a nonprofit foundation, Old House Authority also assists artisans and craftsmen who need financial, legal or other business resources.

We sat down last week with the woman who's determined to save every old house in Richmond and found that, as always, nothing stirs her blood like a demolition permit.

Q. Where is this preservation drive rooted? Did you grow up in an old house?

A. Oh, of course. In the West End in the Westhampton area. As a child, I had tremendous respect for construction and materials because we had very unusual things like a stone house. We had a mantel that was hewn from an old log. We had ornamental plasterwork.

So I just grew up around old things and was always very appreciative of the fact that my house didn't look like anybody else's house. I do remember -- and maybe way back this was an impetus for the business -- the hurdles that my father would have to go through finding somebody who could repair our jagged slate roof. When we needed repair work on stone, that wasn't an easy thing to find.

You couldn't just go to the Yellow Pages and find the people to do this kind of work.

Q. How did you end up holding off bulldozers all over neglected areas of the city?

A. I took a job with the Historic Richmond Foundation in the early'90s and was there for about five years and left. I had some friends who were starting ACORN, another preservation organization.

Historic Richmond Foundation focused on buildings that are historically rich architecturally, but that leaves out a whole range of typical or what we might call ordinary houses in neighborhoods where nothing particularly historic happened or houses that were well made but not architecturally distinguished in any way. There was no advocate for those houses in those neighborhoods until ACORN came along.

I was proud to work on that. We did a lot of work in overlooked neighborhoods. We had a focus on vacant and abandoned buildings. We published a book on black architecture.

Q. Which neighborhoods? How many houses were saved during your tenure?

A. Jackson Ward, Carver, Barton Heights, Highland Park, Manchester, Blackwell, Church Hill North, Union Hill.

Those neighborhoods are all doing pretty well today in terms of the recognition that their housing stock is important and worth preserving.

I'd say over 100 houses, but then it was always hard to quantify our work because we didn't buy or sell them. We were the middle person.

Q. Why did you leave ACORN and start Old House Authority?

A. Much of the time I spent at ACORN was answering calls or requests from people for information about where to find the artisans and the experts who could help them with a historically appropriate renovation or restoration.

You can't Google these people. They're in my Rolodex or in my head. It was funny because it didn't matter if I was at the grocery store or standing in line to see a movie or at the gym, somebody would always come up and say, 'Do you know a good floor refinisher, plumber, somebody who can retrofit my bathroom or kitchen?'

Those types of experts are discovered through word of mouth. They tend to be one-person shops, somebody in his studio or his basement. Typically they have all the work they can handle so they're not aggressively marketing because they've got jobs lined up that they absolutely can't handle.

The problem with that for the homeowner is they go to a contractor and end up with someone who has no experience in old houses, get vinyl replacement windows and the house ends up 'remuddled' and it's a loss.

I just realized there was a for-profit opportunity to put people in touch with experts who could give them good advice and good direction.

Q. Preservation for a long time has been based on economic benefit, such as historic tax credits and resale. Is that still true?

A. Now the emphasis is on green. There's nothing more green than saving and recycling an old house.

People don't realize that when you demolish something, you've got to carry it away to a landfill, you've lost the embedded energy in the house, you have to bring materials in from all over the world flying around in the air.

The most energy-efficient thing you can do is save it, but make it energy efficient.
Contact Julie Young at (804) 649-6732 or jyoung@timesdispatch.com.