The doors of a grand mansion built on a hill in the Monte Vista neighborhood at the turn of the 20th century are open once again.
On Wednesday, a high school senior and 4th grader stood side-by-side at the top of the home’s dozen stone steps and cut the ceremonial ribbon on Great Hearts at the Koehler House.
Fanning in the morning heat, their families and school staff watched from lawn chairs lined up across newly installed artificial turf, the renewed home-turned-schoolhouse in full frame.
Developer Weston Urban acquired the property for $2.3 million from San Antonio College in 2023, proposing to turn the former home of Pearl Brewing founders Otto and Emma Koehler into a special event space.
Weston Urban CEO Randy Smith, whose children attended the school, invited the students in to see the house where they had played on the lawn.
During a tour he led, Smith shared the history of the 12,665 square-foot house with three levels: a ballroom at the top and a one-lane bowling alley in the basement. The Richardsonian Romanesque-style home, carriage house and sweeping grounds were slated for a new chapter.
Then, plans changed to what Smith said was, “vastly superior for the neighborhood and the school.”
“When I first knew we’d be using the lawn again, as well as the house, it felt too good to be true,” said Monet Lessner, executive director of special student services at Great Hearts Texas. “I wondered if the ghost of Emma Koehler had missed the children and intervened on our behalf.”
Lessner called the grounds where children will play during recess the “perfect backdrop” to a classical education.
Great Hearts Monte Vista is a public charter school that opened in 2014. The classical school has its kindergarten-5th grade classrooms in the education wing at Temple Beth El, and middle and high schoolers at Trinity Baptist Church, 319 East Mulberry Ave.
The Koehler House at 310 W. Ashby is where students went for outdoor recess.
Now with a 10-year lease from Weston Urban, Great Hearts will have use of the entire property, inside and out.
The developer best known for its downtown projects, most recently 300 Main and The Continental, oversaw the restoration with the San Antonio-based architecture firm Ford Powell Carson.
Weston Urban’s director of construction, Katherine Fontenot, lauded contractor Troy Jessee Construction for their work on the project, and Rialto Studio for the landscape design.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the house is estimated to cost more than $100,000 when it was built, but was in need of extensive and careful repair.
“We were just trying to ensure that we kept the historic character even and made it compliant [for a school],” Fontenot said. “So you have this balancing act.”
For the school, the first floor is being transformed into a library and art classrooms, and the lower level into music classrooms. The renovated carriage house also will be used for art lessons.
The upper floor is now occupied by the executive team of Great Hearts Texas.
Headmaster Kate Imber said an anonymous donor contributed funding for a new fenced sport court, the words “truth, beauty and goodness” painted on the surface, and built next to a green house that will be used by the school’s gardening club.
Others contributed funds through a capital campaign for extras in the project, such as sound-proofing the music rooms.
The playground has been named in memory of 8-year-old Kellyanne Lytal, who died last year in the floodwaters at Camp Mystic, “one of Heaven’s 27,” said Jacquie Fagan, director of community engagement. “We vow to remember: In a world where you can be anything, be kind.”
Great Hearts is able to lease the Koehler House in part because it frees up new classroom space in the main school building allowing for an increase in enrollment, Imber said.
Enrollment has reached 572 in grades K-5th for the upcoming school year, which starts Aug. 11.
Widowed in 1914, Emma Koehler famously ran the Pearl brewery through Prohibition, and lived in the house for more than four decades until her death in the home in 1943.
