Driving by the burned out shell of a house at Monroe Street and 13th Avenue, Andy Nichols said it was a shame the house had become so rundown.

After all, it had once served as a boarding house for out-of-town lawmakers, and now was an eyesore in a Central Phoenix neighborhood showing some signs of revitalization. Mr. Nichols decided almost on the spot to buy the house, renovate it and offer it as housing for low-income families.

Mr. Nichols, a Democrat serving as state senator from Tucson at the time, died a couple of years later of a heart attack. He never saw the deal close on the house, but today, it’s ready for occupancy. The Sen. Andy Nichols Lodge, as the house has been dubbed, has been divided into five apartments. The two lower apartments will rent for whatever the market will bear, while the three second-story apartments will be rent-subsidized under a federal housing program.

“It was a real labor of love,” said Sen. Ken Cheuvront, D-Dist. 15. It’s a description both of Mr. Nichols’s vision for the house and Mr. Cheuvront’s role in renovating the house.

“Like a lot of people, I was real skeptical about Sen. Nichols’s plan for the house at first,” Mr. Cheuvront said recently, showing a reporter around the 3,800-square-foot house. “When I first saw it, it was nothing but a burned-out shell.”

A Nod To His Mentor

Mr. Cheuvront, like many Democrats in the Legislature, saw Mr. Nichols as a mentor. The two would have dinner together each Monday night when the Legislature was in session.

Mr. Cheuvront had experience renovating his own home in downtown Phoenix, and his company, Cheuvront Construction, specializes in reconstruction of burned structures.

“I hadn’t seen anything quite this bad, though, that required a good deal of historic restoration,” Mr. Cheuvront said.

Now, the apartments feature hardwood floors in the living areas and hallways, tile in the kitchens and bathrooms, carpeted bedrooms, built-in bookcases and wood-framed windows.

“We had to build every one of those from scratch,” Mr. Cheuvront said of the numerous windows in the two-story house in the Woodland Historic District of downtown Phoenix. Private funding was used for the renovations, so the price has not been disclosed.

Built around the turn of the last century, the Nichols Lodge is a Prairie style house, which, according to the About Architecture Web site, features low horizontal lines and open interior spaces, as distinct from the high ceilings of Victorian style houses that had rooms taller than they were wide and doors and hallways separating all the rooms. The style was first dubbed “Prairie style” by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, but numerous architects designed houses in that style in the first half of the 20th century.

The Nichols Lodge sits within District 16, which Rep. Leah Landrum Taylor serves in the Legislature. Like Mr. Cheuvront, Ms. Landrum Taylor, a Democrat, considered Mr. Nichols a mentor.

“The man was so dedicated,” Ms. Landrum Taylor said. “We talked about a whole lot of things when he was in the House, in my freshman year (1999). He never said anything to me about the house; it was just one of those many things that he would do from the heart and you might not even hear about it until much later, and usually, it would be from someone else.” —