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Architect Tony Belluschi didn’t want to leave Portland when he was a child. Yet for nearly 60 years, the commercial architect has been reluctant to return to the city where his father, late architect Pietro Belluschi, became legendary.

But Tony Belluschi has been traveling between his home in Chicago and Portland, where he is quietly restoring his father’s most loved residential project, the Burkes House in the West Hills. It’s where Tony plans to live the rest of his life, just like his father.

The house was completed for $75,000 in 1948 for D.C. Burkes and his wife, Genevieve. The flat-roofed, mid-century structure sits at the dead end of a winding road filled with Arts and Crafts-style houses. It was the last residence Pietro designed before he became dean of the MIT School of Architecture + Planning and the family moved to Boston in 1951. It was also Pietro’s favorite home; in 1973, he bought it from Genevieve Burkes, and he and his wife, Marjorie, lived out their final days there.

“This house and this city meant a lot to my father and (me),” Tony Belluschi said. “My father and I talked about fixing it up many times. It’s this wonderful, hilltop house with a view of three mountains. Its glass walls and the way they transition into the wood ceiling … it’s just extraordinary.”

Tony Belluschi, 69, said he felt like he was being uprooted when the family moved to Boston. He and his brother, Peter, were like two fish out of water on the East Coast, Belluschi said. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, Belluschi started a firm of his own in Boston and later spent eight years as an architect in Los Angeles during the 1970s. Eventually he took over a firm in Chicago, where he has spent the last 25 years.

But when Marjorie in 2007 asked her stepson to return to Portland to replace the Burkes House’s leaking roof, he obliged.

“I always knew it was a bad thing to leave Portland in the first place,” Belluschi said. “But I’ve always been leery of people comparing me to my father. I tried to be in cities where no one knew who he was. I guess I’ve always been a tumbleweed. But when you do that, you start to lose your roots.”

Pietro had planned to add a pitched roof to the Burkes House because of the number of leaks that developed in the home’s flat roof over the years. But Tony instead preserved the original by adding a new roof membrane. Marjorie then began requesting help with the house more frequently as she aged, according to Marti Belluschi, Tony’s wife.

“As things happened with the house, she turned to Tony,” Marti said. “He has been working on this house in one way or another since his father died (in 1994). Every time we visited, she kept saying, ‘You’re moving here, right?’ ”

When Marjorie died last year, Tony Belluschi built a small studio apartment, which he calls the ‘teahouse,’ near the house so he had a place to stay while he worked with Greenline Fine Woodworking to strip and refinish the Burkes House inch by inch. The house, hardly touched in 60 years, required several different wood finishes. Belluschi is refinishing the house, approximately 2,600 square feet, from its cork floors to its wood-paneled ceilings.

“The work I’ve done over the last year and a half has been more intense, cost more and took longer than I could have ever imagined,” Belluschi said. “I’m sort of in transition. The economy has been horrible so I’ve had the luxury of time. The house is something my father, the Burkeses and I loved. I needed time to do it right.”

Most of the original furniture was removed. The kitchen was ripped apart, opened up and furnished with modern appliances; however, Pietro’s wooden cabinets were retained. Pietro’s former study, and its Eames-style lounge chairs, architectural prints and library, were preserved.

“Tony has renovated it, modernized it and expanded it, all with a nod to the original architect,” Marti said. “We’ve made it our own. We tried to approach this as our house, and not Pietro and Marjorie’s home we’re living in.”

Work still remains. An addition is being finished, and the Belluschis need to unpack and settle in. But Tony said he is finally ready to come home.

“Obviously I’m the son of Pietro, and he was as big of a problem as a helper in my development as an architect,” Belluschi said. “I’m not trying to mimic what my father did. But he was always a presence.

“This house has been a labor of love. At some point, you start to be here more than there. I feel like I’m here now.”