After 125 years in the same family, the Sublett-Miller House was purchased at an estate auction in April 2000, by Tom and Carla Belles. Attracted by an advertisement in the National Trust’s magazine Preservation, the couple from Falls Church, Virginia, placed the high bid for this High Victorian Gothic-style brick mansion with pointed arched windows and lacy cast-iron porches.

Currently, they are engaged in an ambitious restoration of the property, carefully refurbishing original features of the mansion from its earliest days in 1874, when Charles M. Sublett built this architectural fantasy as a dream house for his bride, the former Jennie Cosby.

The new owners also are preserving and enhancing the house’s early additions and embellishments, many dating from the 1880s, about a decade after Mr. Sublett had died, and his widow, Jennie, married E. Howe Miller. Their son, and then their grandson, lived here for most of the 20th century, the latter until his death in 1997.