How a 142-year-old house, vacant for 3 decades, became a Salt Lake City bistro
Oct 19, 2024, 8:00 AM
The exterior of Roux Restaurant in Salt Lake City is pictured on Thursday. The restaurant opened earlier this year, giving life to a 142-year-old home that went through an extensive renovation to preserve its history. (Carter Williams, KSL.com)
(Carter Williams, KSL.com)
SALT LAKE CITY — Adam and Kristen Cold spent months searching for the right location for them to set up their idea for a modern French bistro with a classic twist.
The couple who met at Utah Valley University initially thought they’d open a location in Utah County, but that all changed when they found a property in Salt Lake City’s Central City neighborhood, a few blocks east of downtown. It was a recently renovated one-floor structure with white walls and dirty floors, but they saw charm.
“I felt like the property matched my aesthetic and style of food quite well,” said Adam Cold.\
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They agreed that this would be where they’d establish Roux Restaurant (515 E. 300 South), which opened in February.
But those who come to dine here for the restaurant’s brown butter rainbow trout or fennel-crusted pork loin may not know they’re sitting in a piece of Salt Lake City history or one that was vacant for years until a local developer scooped it up and refurbished it with the help of a federal program that incentivizes historic preservation.
The Midgley House
Roux is the newest use for the Midgley House, an adobe structure that Joshua Midgley completed in 1882 before Central City experienced its first wave of apartments. Midgley was a well-respected interior painter and wallpaper hanger in the 19th century, whose work included the Salt Lake Temple.
The home remained with the family for over a century, even becoming an office space for Paul Evans, a prominent 20th-century architect, during the mid-1900s. However, it had also become vacant by the late 1980s.
It was worse for wear by the time Jeff Taylor purchased the property in 2018. The home was mostly boarded up, and it had all sorts of water damage throughout as its adobe exterior began to crumble. A large portion of its porch had burned in a fire. Its interior wasn’t much better, either.
Read the full story from KSL.com here.
