Kelsey Stryffe knows her way around old stones and bricks. Few jobs call for this skill, but Stryffe is perfectly suited for her role as Cincinnati Observatory’s historic facilities manager and as a heritage masonry restoration contractor. Now, she’s using her skills and knowledge to help rebuild historical structures around Greater Cincinnati, one brick and stone at a time.
“My goal is to really just educate people on historic architecture, but also to show them traditional materials and traditional fixes are extremely important, especially when we want these buildings to last for years and years and years,” Stryffe told CityBeat.
Stryffe started working in heritage masonry in 2023, but her love of history and old homes and structures started long before.
As a teenager, she was fascinated by places like Savannah and Charleston and the architectural styles that dominate these historic Southern cities, from the grand Greek Revival mansions to charming and romantic Gothic Revival homes and gingerbread-decorated Victorians. She initially wanted to study art and architectural history at the prestigious Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) after high school, but opted for an art program closer to home, first at Bowling Green State University and then Miami University.
“Growing up, I was like, I can’t wait to get the heck out of Cincinnati,” Stryffe said. “I was like, Oh, my God — Savannah has this beautiful bubble of historic homes, and I just want to be there. But I wasn’t looking at what was right in front of me the whole time. … I don’t even know what other cities out there have as vast of a collection of historic structures still intact [as Cincinnati].”
After college, Stryffe took a job at the Observatory, leading tours and teaching history to visitors, but in 2023, a new local program caught her eye and made her consider a shift in her career. At the time, the Covington Academy of Heritage Trades (CAHT) was a newly launched school promising to teach the skills and knowledge one would need to work in the heritage trades and restore old homes and buildings, offering intro weeks on subjects like restoring wood windows and masonry. Stryffe, already interested in brick and stone work, jumped into the masonry course and found it was something she could see herself doing as a job.
“I took the course just to see if I could do it, and then I was passionate enough to do it,” said Stryffe. “I was like, I want to learn how to do this as a career. … I always wanted to just get in and get my hands dirty, and I ran with that.”
Stryffe took more intro week courses at CAHT, learning skills like plastering and fixing wood windows and getting hands-on experience and practical knowledge in the school’s “living lab” on Madison Avenue in Covington.
“You’re actually working on a historic home and learning … And, we’d be in there fixing plaster or taking window sashes out and just kind of deconstructing this house, but also putting it back together,” she said. “And it was just so fascinating. And I’m like, I want to be able to do this, but I’ve always kind of been one-foot-in, one-foot-out, because I love my job at the Observatory and it offers me the stability and support I needed while I also explored these additional passions.”
Stryffe continued her full-time job at the Observatory and started apprenticing part-time to gain more experience. She stopped apprenticing after a couple of years to focus more on her projects at the Observatory, but a big restoration project at her workplace this past summer called her back to masonry.
Needing the stonework on the building’s façade to be repaired and cleaned, the Observatory contacted contractors for quotes. After hearing there were contractors who wanted to powerwash the sandstone — a soft and porous type of rock that can erode under that kind of pressure — Stryffe had the chance to put her knowledge and skills to the test.
“I was like, ‘You realize you can’t powerwash sandstone, right?’ At least to the extent they were offering. They’re like, ‘Well, how would you do this? Can you do it?’” she said.
Stryffe spent much of the summer with a spray bottle filled with a Dawn dish detergent-water solution and a fine-toothed, non-metallic bristle brush as she scrubbed away at years’ worth of algae and lichen that had accumulated on the stones — tough and dirty work, but it was also the start of something new.
“It was almost kind of healing in a way, because I was missing the jobs that I was on, and taking on such a large project on my own, on a National Historic Landmark, really made me feel confident in the skills I already knew I had but felt I couldn’t utilize.”
Brick & Bone
The summer Observatory project influenced her promotion to historic facilities manager and jump-started an idea that would eventually become Stryffe’s business, Brick & Bone Masonry Restoration, which she officially launched at the beginning of the year. It was something she hadn’t imagined doing before.
“I never really had the confidence to be, like, ‘I’m going to start my own business,’ and do this. But I loved the work and wanted to see what it was like to take on my own side projects, on my own schedule,” she said.
When Stryffe began easing into the idea of having her own business last year, she knew it would have to start off slow, but later in the summer, she was approached by her first client: a former manager who was looking to make repairs to his 1812 barn. Working on the barn reaffirmed that Stryffe could do her trade on the side.
“It’s just repairing his foundation, working with a lot of old stone, rebuilding a lot of the walls that are collapsing, using the correct mortar materials and just understanding the barn was built in 1812 — what materials did they use in 1812? Can we replicate it doing things like for like?”
With the launch of Brick & Bone, Stryffe says she’s not a house-flipper and has no interest in becoming one. Instead, she wants to use her business to help those who own historical homes and buildings better understand how to properly care for these structures.
Part of that mission is also happening online. Since the Observatory project, Stryffe’s been using her social media to share what she’s learned and help educate others on the importance of preserving these stones and bricks that are hundreds of years old. On her Instagram, you’ll see videos of her using a spray bottle to help cure lime mortar, repointing stones and showing the effects of time, elements and improper material use on these often-overlooked, but wholly essential building blocks that need a specific touch.
“Especially in [the Tri-State] area, a lot of people, they’re in historic homes … They don’t know what materials are appropriate. We have contractors all over the place that are just like, ‘Yeah, I can fix that for you,’ and it’s not the right type of stuff,” she said.
A dying trade, a dying art
Understanding how to repair and restore the different facets of a historical building requires different skill sets than making similar fixes in a modern building. And while the number of people with that knowledge is dwindling, the demand for historical building repairs and renovations is growing.
A 2022 report from The Campaign for Historic Trades shows that by 2030, as many as 462,000 buildings across the country will be added to the National Register of Historic Places, and the total number of buildings that could be considered “historic” could grow to between 5.7 and 8.3 million. In that same report, experts in heritage construction agree that there’s a shortage of laborers with those kinds of skills and knowledge, and there’s a need to support traditional trades training, like the programs offered by Covington Academy of Heritage Trades.
A 2023 study of trades professionals and preservation specialists by the University of New Hampshire shows there are “severe workforce shortages in plastering, masonry, carpentry, materials conservation, decorative finishes, windows, and iron work.” Seventy-five percent of the study’s survey respondents said they believe the demand for preservation trades is growing, but 93% felt young people lacked knowledge about career opportunities in these trades.
Stryffe’s seen the gap in knowledge between caring for a historical structure versus modern ones firsthand, like layers of cement over a stone foundation, which will trap in moisture and eat away at the stone’s structural integrity, or the use of a foam insulation in a basement that isn’t vapor-permeable but is billed as the “latest and greatest” product.
“There’s not too many people out there that know the proper materials to use when fixing 1800s brick structures, or plaster repairs”, said Stryffe.“They don’t know all it takes to go into the different layers of it and how they used to use animal hair as a binding agent. And there aren’t people out there that are willing to replicate that.”
Building a foundation and preserving history, brick by brick
Stryffe isn’t shy about her love of history and historic preservation, especially when it comes to the stones and bricks she works with.
“There’s something about bricks and stone that’s just so timeless to me. … There’s so many different kinds of bricks, and there’s a whole history to how bricks were made,” she explained. “A lot of these bricks were made by hand, either on site or from brick plants not far away.”
But her love of bricks and stones makes sense — they’re key to any good foundation. The long hours learning about various bricks and stones, how to clean them, what kind of mortar they need to be pieced back together again and then putting that to practice has been Stryffe’s foundation. And like any good mason, she’s continuing to build a foundation that will stand the test of time, brick by brick.
“I do research every day. I’m always learning about different stone types, correct mortar materials. What’s appropriate to go on brick versus stone? Is this brick harder than this brick? What is this interior brick telling me versus the exterior? There’s so many aspects to it,” she said. “I want to be able to look at [a problem] and be like, ‘Okay, this is happening the way it’s happening because of this reasoning.’ And then going in and being like, ‘This is how I can fix it for you.’”
Stryffe’s foundation is built on learning, but also on the philosophy that things should be built to endure for centuries with the proper stewardship. She shares a quote from English polymath John Ruskin that informs her approach to historic preservation:
“When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, ‘See! This our fathers did for us.”
“Like, look at what these people built, and look how long it’s stood the test of time. We have buildings that are pre-Civil War that are still around,” she said. “[Preservation] is an important reminder of where we came from and that it’s not just us. … It’s almost poetic in a way to be able to rebuild something that somebody else had built hundreds of years ago.”
You can learn more about Brick & Bone Masonry Restoration and watch Stryffe’s journey in the heritage trade on her Instagram page, @kelsey_j_stryffe. She’s open to stone, brick and plaster work in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. You can also visit the Observatory, where Stryffe leads tours on Tuesdays and Thursdays, to see her work firsthand.