It's a new chapter for the storybook house at 87 15th St.

Renovation began this week on The Castle, the century-old landmark across from the Woodruff Arts Center. Three permits for exterior and interior repairs -- dated Jan. 19, Feb. 4 and 7 -- have been issued to the address, according to city records.

Three local contractors confirmed their involvement in the remodeling, which began on the exterior on Saturday when Keith Roberts of Roberts Roofing tore asphalt off the roof. 

Castle owner Mike Latham, an industrial artist and architect from New York City, wrote in an e-mail Thursday he's "stabilizing the building to prevent further decay." He and a partner bought the long-vacant building last August for a reported $951,000.

"This guy is fun to work with," Roberts said of Latham. Many historic renovation projects slack off when owners lose funding or interest, but he doesn't anticipate this with Latham.

"They got the power behind him to do this right," he said. "A lot of those projects get a stalemate. This guy, I don't get that from. He's willing to fight for what he wants."

Latham told WABE last September he was thinking about opening a restaurant in The Castle and maybe "a tiny Southern hotel, really luxurious." He didn't elaborate Thursday, except to say there's "lots more to come."

Latham's firm Arts Corporation blurs the lines between art, architecture and technology. Arts Corporation's designs include a cedar-shell home on Shelter Island, N.Y., an alarm clock that triggers espresso brewing, as well as conceptual and performance-based art installations.

Besides Roberts Roofing, renovator Neal Gasaway and architect Leslie Tyrone are assisting in the remodeling of The Castle.

At this point, Gasaway said, he's "just cleaning up."

Roberts said he already sent The Castle's old asphalt roofing to a company in Fort Worth, Texas, that will be recycle it into pavement.

The Castle was erected between 1909 and 1913 as a retirement home for Ferdinand Dallas McMillan, a former Confederate officer. In the years since, according to the 1996 book "Conversations at the Castle," it housed boarders, a restaurant, the Atlanta Theatre Guild and other arts groups, then sat empty for decades and got a leaky roof.

Considering the "abuse" it's taken over the years, Roberts said, The Castle is in "impeccable shape."

"It'll last a thousand years. It was framed by a mastermind."

Roberts said he isn't sure how Latham will want it roofed, possibly with slate, but "he does not want anything phoney. He wants real material, organic material."

The roofing cost estimate on Roberts' city permit is $7,450, according to records. 

Latham is a Florida native and 1997 graduate of Columbia College, where the college alumni magazine wrote in a profile in 2003 that he "challenges the most mundane of interior design principles -- that furniture must be stationary."

In 2006 The New York Times profiled the 2,000-square-foot East Village loft where Latham had evolved a "bachelor pad" full of mobile, wheeled furniture and even a moveable shower. "It’s not logical, practical or necessary," Latham told the paper. The design fit the "mobile and global culture" of modern-day nomads. "Even though I'm in this apartment, it won't be my ancestral home years from now."

His taste for design extends to his entirely custom-made wardrobe, according to the The New York Sun, and includes a collection of bespoke leather sneakers bearing the Arts Corporation logo, a bar-code.

Roberts expects logistics to be the biggest challenge of The Castle's renovation. The City of Atlanta sent him "through the gauntlet" for a permit, he said. But he chalks at least part of that up to the intense curiosity in The Castle, a stone medieval anachronism in the midst of sleek glass towers.

"It's such a romantic building. I would love to be a hunchback who lives there," he said. "It's going to be such a feather in the cap of Atlanta."