That's what Nolet discovered after purchasing her two-story home at 1145 Minnesota Ave. in December 2003.

She says there were definitely kinks to work out. The home had a poorly maintained interior, and rocks and redwood tree branches covered much of the home's front yard. Yet none of it discouraged Nolet from the task at hand.

"I wanted to make something beautiful," she says. "When I saw it, I thought, 'good bone structure.'"

She also discovered after purchasing the home and applying for renovation permits through the San Jose Department of Planning that it had been placed on San Jose's Historical Resources Inventory list. And then Nolet learned that the renovation would require special permits before she could do anything affecting the exterior walls of the house, including paint.

Yet Nolet was not put off by the unexpected complexities.

"I'm all about learning new things," says Nolet, who is a home designer.

If walls talked

Even though Nolet's home is on the city's list of historical structures, its early history is, apparently, unknown.

The planning department's only information about the home is that it is a "Simple Greek Revival," built around 1875. But in the Willow Glen Neighborhood Association's Historical Guide to the Homes of Willow Glen, the home is briefly mentioned as "a nice old Stick Victorian."

April Halberstadt, the author of All About Willow Glen, says discrepancies related to architectural styles are fairly common. Some homes might appear to have elements from one particular style when, in reality, renovations during the past century often resulted in styles far removed from what was originally built.

Nolet proceeded with renovations based on the Simple Greek Revival style.

"Nobody knows what this place used to look like," Nolet says. "I have absolutely nothing to go on. My objective here was to make it feel like a turn-of-the-century home. It's quaint, has an old feeling."

Halberstadt didn't have any information about Nolet's home when she wrote her book, nor is it mentioned in Elizabeth Giarratana's book, Old Willow Glen.

When Nolet's home was built, it was one of just a few homes in a farming community known as The Willows.

Giarratana's book states that in 1869 Miles Hills purchased the Zarella Tract, 94 acres of land immediately west of Lincoln Avenue on both sides of a county road that became Minnesota Avenue. Hills bought his acreage from the prominent landowners Royal Cottle, C.T. Settle and Zarella Valencia and divided the property primarily into 10-acre lots. He sold the lots to individuals who planted fruit orchards on the fertile land and who soon subdivided their properties as land prices skyrocketed.

One of those original farmers possibly built Nolet's home.

Today, a small house sits between Nolet's home and the Willow Glen Elementary School. It was built after yet another property division in the 1980s. Nolet's lot is now just over 4,000 square feet.

This old house

The interior of the 2,400-square-foot home is filled with lots of natural light, from the 8-foot-high windows as well as the new—city-approved—Greek Revival decorative-glass front doors. It was the home's exceptional brightness and its nearly 11-foot-high ceilings that sold Nolet on the property from the beginning. She was also drawn to the downstairs rooms, which are square and symmetrical, unlike the typical Victorian styles.

Nolet purchased the home in "as-is" condition, and once renovations began, the old home's problems quickly surfaced.

"From the middle of the house to the back, the floor was so slanted, that if you dropped a marble at one end, you'd have to run to the other end to get it," Nolet says.

To repair the problem, the subfloor had to be replaced.

Workers who opened walls to add insulation discovered that the original builder had used a minimum number of studs, so as they added insulation, they also added timber.

"There were four layers of linoleum in the kitchen," Nolet says. "Redwood subfloor was beneath it. At the end of the 19th century was when linoleum was big. In everybody's kitchen, if you were anybody, you had linoleum."

She replaced all the flooring throughout most of the house with walnut planks. A clear satin finish was used to showcase the walnut's natural medium-brown and ebony colors. The glued-down carpet on the walnut staircase was also stripped away and refinished.

The plumbing and electrical systems also had to be replaced, and the 1,000-square-foot basement had to undergo repairs to make it watertight.

The work on the house began in January 2004 and was completed five months later by the same crew she has used on her other home-design projects.

Now a pale gold foyer greets visitors, while the adjacent living room draws the eye with its soothing plum-colored walls. A blue sitting room is past the foyer and opposite the dining room, which has blue tones in wallpaper designed with old-fashioned vases.

In the wide 8-foot-high doorway, between the living room and dining room, two-sided custom drapes are tied back, spilling gracefully onto the floor. Nolet found the fabrics herself and created the entire treatment. On the living-room side, a plum and gold fabric perfectly accents the room's plum walls. Cream and silver-blue hues in the fabric on the dining-room side reflect the colors of that room's wallpaper. A muted gold fringe pulls it all together.

Nolet uses crystal chandeliers throughout the house simply because she likes crystal, and they work remarkably well with all her furnishings. Her antique furniture includes a French Country dining-room table from the 1870s and a French Provincial armoire that dates back to about 1780.

For the home's spacious kitchen, Nolet chose granite counters and ebony-stained walnut cabinets. The built-in Thermador refrigerator and dishwasher are also inset into the same wood. Nolet designed a built-in wood china cabinet/buffet that displays her favorite china through its glass doors; it even has a built-in microwave oven. The six-burner stove opposite the refrigerator is the only thing in the house that Nolet saved from demolition.

"Nothing in this house was really of quality," she says.

One aspect of the original architecture that she changed was a narrow staircase that led from the kitchen to an upstairs room. It was unconnected to the rest of the house. Nolet had the staircase removed, giving the kitchen additional space for a separate laundry room. The room at the top of the stairs is now the master bathroom, complete with two walk-in closets, a spacious glass-enclosed shower and custom floor-to-ceiling armoire, with lots of natural light.

The other two bedrooms have double doors on their spacious walk-in closets, a feature Nolet particularly enjoyed designing. She converted a fourth bedroom on the second floor into a guest bathroom.

A personal journey

Where Nolet is today began thousands of miles away on a different coast. She was born in Vietnam and is half French. She was raised by her grandmother, Tue Nguyen, until she was almost 6 years old. In 1978, Nolet and two teenaged uncles escaped the war-torn country on a boat filled with refugees. The rest of the family stayed behind.

"It was very early in the morning, and it was raining really hard," Nolet says. "I remember getting on the boat and crying my little eyes out because my grandmother wasn't going. We just didn't have the money. In order to get smuggled out, each person cost the equivalent of about $10,000 to $15,000."

The three of them wound up in a Malaysian refugee camp for 18 months before immigrating to San Francisco, where Nolet was raised by her uncles. An A student, she finished high school early but dropped out of college for financial reasons. A modeling career followed, and she lived for a couple years in Japan and Scandinavia. In 1993, with money saved, Nolet returned to the United States and received a journalism degree from Santa Clara University in 1997.

While in college, Nolet purchased a run-down condo in Mountain View, renovated it and sold it for a profit. That was the beginning of her foray into the home-design industry. To date, she has taken only a few design classes, but says her abilities are inherent.

"Things just come to me in terms of colors and designs," Nolet says. "It's always been a hobby. So I've read up on it and, through doing the houses, I do a lot of research."

With her condo profit, she bought a Victorian house in the Rose Garden while working as a technical writer at Applied Materials.

"I was doing dry, boring stuff," she says. "I just couldn't wait to get home and work on my house."

She sold the renovated Victorian in 2000, married Alan Nolet, the president of a software company, and in 2001 bought her third property, a ranch house in Los Altos. She demolished it and designed and built a French Provincial-style home on the lot, using a design and details she happened to like.

"The charm of that is I get to see my vision and what I like to have happen," Nolet says. "Whereas if you're doing a project for someone else, it's made to order, following someone's wishes and sense of style."

She sold the French Provincial home and is now working on her fifth home, a Los Altos vacation house built in 1904, with a 30-foot ceiling in its great room.

On structural matters she relies on experts, and she uses referrals for design matters. Nolet was at the Minnesota Avenue home daily during the renovation and has learned a lot about the process during the past few years.

"I guess that's what separates me from a decorator," Nolet says. "I also am in the construction part of it, so I know how things are built and what needs to be done structurally.

She admits she walks around Willow Glen looking at homes that catch her eye, but for now, between her baby son, Aden, and her new project, Nolet has her hands full.

And just as the homes she has taken over have been restored, the same holds true for her family. In 1990, Nolet's grandmother and other family members were able to finally leave Vietnam. Nolet is now reunited with her family, which has resettled permanently in the Bay Area.