Fixer-upper.(The Talk of the Town)(West Village town house for sale)(house renovation)

Many New York City residences contain stacks of old newspapers, but most of these papers do not include reports on the funeral procession of Abraham Lincoln, the sinking of the Titanic, or the death of King George VI, as did those (from 1865, 1912, and 1952) found piled in the living room of a West Village town house that was recently put up for sale.

The house, at 112 Washington Place, is a four-story Federal-style building, constructed in 1832. Its owner, a seventy-nine-year-old man, had been living there alone for more than four decades, since inheriting it from his grandmother, who bought it in 1878. Many of the original details remained, including a winding staircase that split into two on the second floor, six fireplaces, a set of ornate French doors, and a working dumbwaiter. Decades-old paint--in one room, a robin's-egg blue--was peeling mightily, and a leaking roof had caused some plaster to collapse. The owner was not a man who leaped to make changes. As with the newspapers, the crumbling ceilings were left undisturbed.

Last year, the house finally got to be overwhelming, and the owner, through a lawyer, approached a team of three brokers from Prudential Douglas Elliman, who put the property on the market for $3.695 million. The listing touted a "rare opportunity to own best of bones!" before soberly concluding that the property was "in need of a full renovation." Because many of the lights in the house were not working, the brokers showed prospective buyers around by flashlight. Marco Pirozzolo, one of the brokers, said, "I would tell them this is not about money--it's about having the wherewithal."

The owner, a devout man, lived in almost monklike simplicity. He had no central heating or air-conditioning. He lacked hot water. He used only the top floor of the building, and slept in the smallest room in the house. Next to his bedroom was the kitchen, which contained a large mint-green enamel sink and a matching gas stove from the twenties, which he used to cook soup and make coffee. There was no refrigerator.

Among the prospective buyers was the actress Mary-Kate Olsen. "She showed up with her big sunglasses," Dennis St. Germain, another of the brokers, said. "She knew her real estate. She said, 'This is three million to renovate and it's a two-year ordeal, and I just can't do that.' " After six months on the market, the house was purchased by Blesso Properties, a development company, which plans to gut the interior and rebuild the house in a modernist ...