The Old Seminole Heights Neighborhood Association dubs their tour “Tampa’s oldest and best attended home tour”, so we were excited to check it out! The Association’s website brags that the tour takes over 100 volunteers to run, and that it attracts between 750 to 1,000 attendees. Although this was not our first year attending this tour, it was our first time attending it since the start of our website and blog, so we were excited to approach it from that angle!

Home Tour Day

Our day started with a beautiful drive over the three-mile Howard Frankland Bridge, which connects St. Petersburg to Tampa. Unfortunately, I was only glancing up periodically to check out the beauty, as I was fully engrossed in trying to find out where the tour started from! The Seminole Heights Home Tour website was no help, and neither was the email I received when I pre-purchased our tickets. I finally found a Facebook event that instructed attendees to bring their purchase receipts to the Seminole Heights Library. Thankfully, that’s where the disorganization on this this tour ended! Once we arrived, we found ample, well-marked parking and lots of signs guiding us into the Library to pickup our wrist bands and tour books. There was a large number of people checking in, but there were plenty of volunteers and check-in tables, so no wait.

A Tree-Shaded Drive

Seminole Heights is a tree-shaded neighborhood nestled in the heart of Tampa. It’s chockablock full of stately old bungalows and quaint cottages dating back to the early 1900’s. The tour offered a trolley, but it only ran every 30 mins so we opted to drive our own car and utilize street parking. We opted to start with home #10 to avoid the crowds, so first on the list was a somewhat plain looking “I-house” from the exterior, but it was downright beautiful! The home was built in 1918 as a two-family residence, which is very apparent as soon as you walk in the front door and see the stunning dual facing staircases! I wish I could have taken a photo of the interior of this one (home tours tend to frown on this for security reasons), because it was just so unique and grand! The exterior doesn’t do it justice!

Another standout was a stately two-story arts & crafts home built in 1922 that recently underwent a full renovation. The home’s second floor featured an extremely large master suite complete with double French doors stepping down into a beautiful master suite with a soaking tub as the room’s centerpiece. Also memorable was a restored 1928 colonial that serves as a very cool bed and breakfast called The Pickett Fence Bed and Breakfast.

Tour for a Cause

I feel as though I don’t mention this enough, but the proceeds from home tours like this are usually funneled right back into the neighborhoods themselves. According to the Old Seminole Heights Neighborhood Association’s website, this home tour is their largest fundraiser of the year. Funds from previous years have gone back into the neighborhood in the form of paying for public murals, building a playground, providing new soccer goals, a bike rack at the library, art benches at the park and landscape improvement projects. It also goes to sponsor activities such as the association’s Summerfest, quarterly happy hours, monthly porch parties, and their holiday social. Finally, they even use some of the funds to contribute to local charities in the area that benefit the neighborhood. So, participating is something we can all feel good about!

Closing

Overall, the Seminole Heights Home Tour was everything we wanted it to be. If there were actually 750 to 1,000 other attendees there with us, I would be surprised. However, the tour was EXTREMELY well-organized. Docents kept traffic flow moving through the homes, there was plenty of street parking around the homes and they had police officers on-hand to help pedestrians cross major roads. Therefore, you could argue that those 750 to 1,000 people didn’t bump into each other much because the flow of the event was so good.

Other Seminole Heights/Tampa Activities

The Seminole Heights Home Tour brought us across Tampa bay, so we decided to make an afternoon of it! During the tour, we walked across the street from one of the homes and stopped for refreshments at the Nebraska Mini-Mart, which sounds very much like a convenience store. It’s actually a previous drive-thru beverage stand, which kept its original form but was transformed into a trendy hipster hangout with a chef-driven food courter, craft drafts, and activities like shuffleboard and bocce ball. After a few mins of rest and great people watching, we were back on our way.

After the tour we were ready for a late lunch, so we headed over to Tampa’s first large Food Hall called Armature Works. The building dates back to 1910, and was once the storage and maintenance facility for Tampa’s Electric streetcars. We grabbed a variety of fares from different vendors (a poke bowl, some bbq, and a gourmet pizza) and took it out to a table by the river to enjoy! It was a great end to a fun day in Tampa!

Hot for Home Tours Disclaimer

The review we just shared doesn’t truly convey the experience we had. Understandably, homeowners don’t like it when you take photos of the inside of their homes, so you really don’t get a true feel for the home tour just from this blog. The purpose of this blog is to share our experience at the tour in terms of planning, content and overall experience. But our opinions should not replace your first hand experiences! We recommend you experience a home tour for yourself. Whether it would be a first for you, or you haven’t been to one in a while! Be sure to visit our Home Tour database to find a home tour in your area, or choose a home tour in an area you have always wanted to visit. Use it as a reason to travel! Happy touring!