A 1924 Tudor Revival, Repiped.

The house was a 1924 Tudor Revival in the Back Country section of Greenwich — slate roof, copper beech trees framing the driveway, gabled stucco-and-half-timber facade, the kind of house that has an entry in the Greenwich Historical Society photographic archive. The original copper supply lines had been in service for one hundred years and had begun to fail at the joints; the homeowner had filed a $40,000 insurance claim in February 2024 after a pinhole leak above the second-floor library caused a ceiling collapse, and Chubb required a documented full repipe as a condition of continued coverage.

The architectural challenge was chase mapping. Tudor revivals of that period have no consistent vertical chases; the original plumbers had run supply lines through wall cavities and joist bays that no longer existed in their original form because of two prior renovations (1962, 2001). We spent a full week before quoting walking the home with the homeowner's architect, David Halpern, AIA, of Halpern & Schau, and Marcus Tewell, the project manager from Watertown Homes who had handled the 2001 renovation. The walk-through produced a marked-up floor plan documenting every existing line, every existing chase, and every wall we would and would not need to open.

The execution approach was a central chase. We cut a fourteen-inch-wide chase through plaster from the basement through the second-floor ceiling, running new Type-L copper from Mueller Industries on a hand-soldered set of joints rather than press-fit (Daniel signed off on the joint count personally). The second-floor master bath got a parallel run of Uponor PEX-A in red and blue to feed the new Waterworks installation that was scheduled to land four weeks behind us. We re-routed around the original 1924 dining-room ceiling medallion — Halpern was clear that the medallion was inviolate — by sending the run up through the butler's pantry closet rather than the dining-room ceiling.

The coordination was four-way. Watertown Homes' project manager ran the master schedule. Halpern & Schau's project manager ran the architectural review on every cut. We coordinated directly with the homeowner's painter — Cabot & Sons of Greenwich, who have done patch-back on three of our previous Greenwich repipes — and her finish carpenter, Theo Larsson, who handled the dining-room medallion re-stabilization after we had cleared the area. Daily 4:00 PM check-ins ran for the duration. The homeowner stayed in the house for the entire eleven-week duration except for the first three nights, when we ran the day-one main cut-over and she took her grandchildren to the Greenwich Hyatt.

The final result: 132 new supply-line joints (87 copper, 45 PEX-A), three water-treatment installations (a Pentair Pelican whole-home softener with carbon filtration, an Aquasana under-sink RO at the kitchen, a UV polish at the master-bath supply line), and a master-bath fixture refresh completed five days behind the rough-in. The homeowner's painter delivered invisible patch-back on every wall we had opened. The homeowner's response, in a hand-written note to Daniel dated October 14, 2024: "The house feels new without feeling renovated. Thank you."

Ashcroft & Vail held our schedule. That sentence is everything.— David Halpern, AIA · Halpern & Schau Architects