Joshua Tug Ferguson for the Wall Street Journal

As a 14-year-old immigrant, Thomas Praggastis sailed from Greece to Ellis Island. Around the same time, young Elias Demetropoulos did, too. Each then headed west to California and each stopped, and stayed, in Utah because its rocks reminded them of their native land. Their families combined, and two generations later, their granddaughter and her husband built a home overlooking Salt Lake City inspired by the Acropolis, which overlooks the Greek capital of Athens.

That granddaughter, Cynthia Strike Petrow, grew up on Chandler Drive in Salt Lake City, in a home that her late mother, Anastasia “Lucy” Strike, had built. Not long after graduating from the University of Utah, Cynthia met her husband, George Petrow, a law student there.

When George retired from his law practice, he and Cynthia bought a lot next to Cynthia’s childhood home in Salt Lake City. They intended to build a new home on the lot so that the two homes together – the old and the new – would form a kind of mini-compound for extended family visits with 24 Greek relatives who love each other’s company around the holidays.

In settling above Salt Lake City, Cynthia and George had struck a bargain. George had wanted to live in Venice, California, and even bought a home there, but he agreed to stay instead in Salt Lake City when Cynthia allowed him to choose the new home’s architectural style. The couple stayed in Cynthia’s childhood home while work crews built the new one.

“It wasn’t my idea to live in her childhood home,” George said. “I rolled my eyes. She said, ‘Build whatever you want.’ ”

What George wanted was for the home to be “a box.” Collaborating with the couple on the home’s design was local architecture firm Mooney + Sparano, which came up with a minimalist “floating box concept.” Built in 2020, the home is 5,500 square feet, with four bedrooms and five bathrooms, at a cost of $3.85 million – a box too big and too expensive to leave behind for Venice, George said. The new home became their primary residence.

The Mooney + Sparano partner who worked with the couple on the design, Anne Mooney, took the job because she grew up several blocks away, around the same time as Cynthia.



Joshua Tug Ferguson for the Wall Street Journal

The Petrows’ new home is essentially a limestone box. Limestone was the material used to build the Parthenon, the ancient temple that has endured for millennia atop the Acropolis. At the front of the home are what the architect calls “fins,” vertical elements that Cynthia intended to be reminiscent of the Parthenon’s columns.

The home appears to float. It rests upon a base that is recessed 1 foot and lifts the home 1 foot off the front lawn.

The couple’s next thought was to flood the new home with sunlight – windows through which to see the valley below, day and night.

Nate King, the project manager who is now Mooney + Sparano’s chief architect, said he responded to George’s love of limestone by hanging limestone cladding on a clip system, manufactured by a contractor in Texas, on the exterior, and limestone floor tile inside from European Tile in Salt Lake City.

“The exterior is low maintenance,” King said, “no need to replace or recoat.”

The front door, 10 feet tall and 4 feet wide, is made of torch-burnished copper, fabricated by Artistic Metal Works in West Bountiful. The door is Cynthia’s tribute to her grandfather, who operated a grocery store until his death in 1951 for the miners of Bingham Canyon Mine, which locals call the Kennecott Copper Mine – a mine so large it can be seen from space. The door serves an even greater memory, Cynthia said. “It is a tribute to the American immigrant dream.”

On the main level near the entrance is an elevator to the floor below. Straight ahead is a floor-to-ceiling window that provides a hint of the Wasatch Range.

Inside are blank walls everywhere, on which George can hang his photography collection. Among the works displayed is a time-lapse photograph of New York City’s Fifth Avenue, created by South Korean photographer Atta Kim over a 24-hour period, in which moving objects fade, with only a mist remaining. The intent of Kim’s photo: showing that people come and go, in contrast to limestone. Limestone endures. The photo is framed by the front window and can be seen through the fins/columns.

George spends much of his time in the upstairs office, toward the front of the home, where he sits in front of a computer doing “admin – finances, paying the plumber.” That’s where he and Cynthia sometimes watch TV together.

The main bedroom is down the hall. The living space – living room, dining room and kitchen – is on the other side.

A pocket door of opaque glass can be used to separate dinner guests from the kitchen when George, the retired attorney, washes the dishes. The Petrows call their home
Oikos, a Greek word for house, household or family. In every family, in every household, someone must do the dishes.

Informal space – including a family room, a wine cellar, and three bedrooms, one each for the Petrows’ children – is downstairs,
accessed by stairs and the elevator.

The lower level includes a walkout basement that rests upon “very stable Lake Bonneville shoreline gravel,” King said, referring to the Late Pleistocene era paleolake that once covered most of Salt Lake City and beyond.

The new home’s back door faces east, and Cynthia’s childhood home’s back door faces west. A walkway connects the two. Stairs from the new home’s backyard pool – a rectangle that is 8 feet deep at the deep end and heated to 85-ish degrees – also lead to the older home, allowing the 24 Greeks visiting in summertime and at Christmastime to move easily between the two.

The Petrows could not be happier with their new home, with inspirations spanning continents, millennia and generations of family history.



Joshua Tug Ferguson for the Wall Street Journal