Detail of Gothic Victorian doors in the kitchen/parlor area at 390 Mount Hope St., in North Attleboro. At left, Bruce Rosenbaum peeks out from the upper window of his home.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

Neighborhood children used to call it the haunted house. Adults noted its resemblance to the mansion that cartoonist Charles Addams created for his macabre family.

But that was before Bruce and Melanie Rosenbaum bought the imposing Gothic Victorian on a hill at 390 Mount Hope St., in North Attleboro last year.

The Rosenbaums had finished restoring their own Victorian house in Sharon, Mass., and were inspired to begin a Victorian home renovation business, which they named ModVic, short for Modern Victorian Home Restoration. Melanie is a member of the Sharon Historical Society and Bruce also runs a marketing business.

The Benjamin Stanley Freeman House, in the Attleborough Falls section of town, built as a simple farmhouse around 1830 and transformed into an ornate Italianate mansion in 1877, is their first professional renovation project. Freeman, a jewelry manufacturer, bought the house from his father in 1860, and added the distinctive central tower and front porches during the 1877 renovation project.

Like many lavish homes built at the time, it is close to the former owner’s business — the Freeman jewelry factory — that today it is a condominium complex. But it is not in an urban location; Mount Hope Street is on a quiet, winding suburban street about one mile from North Attleboro’s downtown.

“We were a little naïve,” Bruce Rosenbaum said last week, leading a tour of the house amid a crew of carpenters and painters working to finish the renovation before open-house weekend, April 5 and 6. “It took twice as long and cost twice as much” as they had planned, he said.

But today, the house is a source of curiosity and pride in town, and is an interesting mix of historic character and modern amenities.

The Rosenbaums hope to use that curiosity to help raise money for the North Attleboro Firebarn Preservation Society. A donation of $5 will be requested at the April 5 (9 a.m. to 5 p.m.) and April 6 (12 p.m. to 5 p.m.) open house tours, and the money will be donated for the painting of the Falls Fire Barn Museum, home of the town’s historical artifacts and archives.

The couple hired a noted Providence architectural historian, William McKenzie Woodward, to research the house’s history. For many years, the house had been used as a rental property, and was divided into five apartments. Rosenbaum said Woodward was able to surmise how the rooms had been configured and used in the past.

“He was like a house detective,” he said.

Woodward’s history of the house notes that although the condition “declined steadily” in the century after the Freemans’ deaths, “it remarkably underwent no major changes externally or internally, only flimsy partitions increasingly dividing the interiors.”

Rosenbaum bought the house on June 27 for $416,000, and construction started shortly after the July 4 holiday. He said 10 to 15 people have been working at the house 8 to 10 hours a day. The 4,500-square-foot house will go on the market next month after the tour with an asking price around $1.5 million. Rosenbaum did not want to say how much the renovation cost, but did say that his total investment in the property is already over $1 million.

Bruce Rosenbaum said the aim is to buy, restore, and sell Victorian houses for a profit, retaining as much as possible of the houses’ historic flavor while updating kitchens and bathrooms and introducing modern heating, air conditioning electrical and plumbing systems. When older architectural elements are too far gone to be restored, he said, they make an attempt to find and reuse salvaged vintage replacements before buying new. In the Freeman house, for instance, wooden floorboards salvaged from a church in Springfield, Mass., were used to replace sections of the family-room floor that were too far gone to be refinished. A church pew will be used in a banquette area in the kitchen.

Despite a lot of changes over the years, including some “awful ’70s projects,” such as the installation of vinyl flooring over the wood floors, many of the most attractive features survived.

There are three marble fireplace mantels, more than 20 inset-panel walnut doors, decorative hardware and intricately carved woodwork, moldings and trim.

A circular center staircase leads from the first floor up to the third floor tower of the house, which has a domed ceiling and a round stained painted-glass window.

There are more than 20 rooms or spaces, from large rooms like the kitchen to smaller “nooks and crannies” type spaces that would be perfect as a reading spot or small office. The house has four or five bedrooms and 3½ baths.

More information about ModVic and the North Attleboro project, visit www.modvic.com.

cdunn@projo.com