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San Antonio’s Koehler House to Undergo Restoration and Become a Social Gathering Place
A fifth-grade class from Great Hearts Monte Vista South recently received a tour of the Koehler House, an imposing Victorian-style mansion in San Antonio. The house was built more than 120 years ago by Otto and Emma Koehler, founders of the Pearl Brewing Co. The house covers nearly two acres, with 12,665 square feet of space on three levels that features a ballroom at the top and a one-lane bowling alley in the basement. It was sold by San Antonio College in 2020 to Weston Urban for $2.3 million. The company’s president and CEO, Randy Smith, has stated that the goal of the restoration is to return the Koehler House to its roots as a social gathering spot. Smith also plans to make the home a venue for events and a place to have family dinners.
The tour was set up by Smith’s plans to give the students a look inside before the remodel gets underway. The tour came with learning opportunities set up at various stations throughout the house — related science, math, art and history lessons taught by professionals in their field and staffers from the Office of Historic Preservation. At the bottom of the narrow stairwell, Smith asked the children to transport themselves back in time, imagine they are German and make beer for a living. “What would you put in your basement?” he asked. The students got to see the only part of the home that Smith recommended they be careful with: the stairs to the basement. On the second floor, Adam Reed, an architect with the San Antonio-based firm FPC, gave the students a fitting lesson in transforming such a grand old home showing its age into a space worthy of weddings and other special events.
Verity Linville, age eleven, admired the elaborate molding and trim throughout the house. She wondered less about ghostly occupants and more about the lessons its walls might hold. Smith expects the work required to bring the home to its former glory to be completed by 2025.
