Tom Silva has spent four decades renovating other people’s houses on television. His own is a nineteenth-century house in a Boston suburb that he has lived in for more than thirty years and, by his own count, renovated five times. On one occasion he cut it in half to remove a wing that had rotted.
There is no purchase price, no listing, and no square footage in the public record, and there is unlikely ever to be, because this is a working contractor’s home rather than a celebrity property. What there is instead is unusually good first-hand material: Silva has talked about the house directly in interviews, and This Old House publishes its own account of his background.
This guide covers what that material establishes about the house he lives in, the 1787 Colonial in Lexington where he learned the trade, and where he lives now.
Who is Tom Silva?
Tom Silva is the general contractor on This Old House and Ask This Old House, roles he has held since 1986. He is a Massachusetts native and part of a family construction business, Silva Brothers Construction, founded by his father Phil in 1963 as P. E. Silva & Sons and run for years by Tom alongside his father and his brother Richard.
The family firm came to television by way of its work rather than by seeking it. The producer Russell Morash encountered the Silvas while they were carrying out a major restoration of an 1845 Greek Revival house, and the company went on to build the original set for the WGBH programme The Victory Garden before joining This Old House. His father remained visiting job sites into his eighties, and his nephew Charlie Silva has since taken on much of the day-to-day running of the business.
He is married with a daughter and a son, and is a keen boater.
The house that made him a contractor
The first house in Silva’s story is not the one he lives in. It is the 1787 Colonial in Lexington, Massachusetts that his family owned, and specifically what he, his father and his brother did underneath it.
They dug and built a basement fallout shelter. The project took two years. Silva has described it as the thing that settled his career: he has said that he felt such pride in what they had accomplished that he knew he wanted to do the work for a living. That is a fairly unglamorous origin story for a television career, and it is also a completely credible one for a general contractor of his generation.
The Lexington Colonial was the family home rather than his own property, and it is not where he lives now.
The house he actually lives in
This Old House describes his home simply as a nineteenth-century house in a Boston suburb, which he continues to renovate himself. Regional coverage has been more specific, describing it as a restored 1865 Victorian in Reading, Massachusetts.
The detail that makes it interesting comes from Silva himself. He has said he has lived in the house for more than thirty years, that he has renovated it five times, and that he once cut it in half. The last of those is not a figure of speech: a wing of the house had rotted,
and he removed it rather than patching it.
Five renovations across three decades is a genuinely unusual way to live. Most people renovate a house once, or twice at a stretch, and then stop. Silva has treated his own home as a continuous project, which is consistent with someone whose working week involves solving other people’s construction problems and who then goes home to his own. Repeated, incremental restoration of a period house is a slower and more expensive path than a single gut renovation, and it is also the one most likely to preserve what is actually there, an argument that runs through projects such as Joanna Gaines’s lakehouse restoration.
What is not publicly known
Almost everything a celebrity property article would normally supply is absent here, and it is worth being explicit about that rather than filling the gap.
There is no recorded purchase price, no date of purchase beyond his own “more than thirty years”, no square footage, no bedroom count, no listing history and no photographs published through a real-estate channel. Silva has never put the house on the market and has not given a full house tour to a magazine.
Any article offering a valuation for the Tom Silva house has derived it from an estimated net worth. He is a working contractor and a public television presenter, not a film star, and he has never made his home part of the show.
Where does Tom Silva live now?
In a Boston suburb in Massachusetts, in the nineteenth-century house he has occupied for over thirty years.
This is well supported. This Old House, his employer of forty years, states it directly on its own cast page and describes him as still renovating the property. Regional New England coverage places the house in Reading and dates it to 1865. He remains involved with Silva Brothers Construction, which operates in the same area, and he has lived in Massachusetts his whole life.
What has not been established, and what nobody should state, is anything more precise than the town. This Old House itself declines to name it, which is a reasonable position for a programme that puts its contractor on camera every week, and this article follows the same line.
New England has produced a handful of television craftsmen who stayed put rather than relocating for the industry, including Wayne Carini in Connecticut. Silva belongs firmly in that category: the house is not a trophy; it is where the work happens when the cameras are off.
Sources
- This Old House on his career, Silva Brothers Construction, the 1787 Lexington Colonial and the fallout shelter, and his current nineteenth-century home in a Boston suburb.
- New England for his own account of living in the house for more than thirty years, renovating it five times and cutting it in half.
- GBH for his role on This Old House and Ask This Old House.
