JURY DUTY: Interior Decoration on Trial

I recently spent a long day in the Hancock County Courthouse in Ellsworth, Maine, as part of a jury pool.  I wasn't selected for a jury, but while there I spotted a crime that should be on trial, though I'm certain that I could not be an impartial juror, so egregious is this case to my delicate sensibilities.  But back to that crime in a moment, while we take a brief detour before exposition.

The Public Library, built as the home of early 19th century builder Seth Tisdale

Ellsworth is a pleasant town, not high style, the sort of place where people put on pancake breakfasts and bake sales and hold raffles to raise money for good causes.  Most of the population is neither desperately poor nor obscenely rich, giving the small city a particularly homogeneous tone.  Politics tend toward the conservative side, to the irritation of the more liberal but less populous coastal villages that satellite it and share a  legislative district.  As Route One passes through Ellsworth, beginning the last hundred or so miles of the long trip up from Key West before ending at the Canadian border, it is lined with strip malls and convenience stores, making it the retail hub of the area.

The old jailhouse between Library and Courthouse, now the home of the Ellsworth Historical Society

Courthouse, Congregational Church, and City Hall

The City Hall was designed by Philadelphia architect Edmund B. Gilchrist as part of a city renewal effort after a 1932 fire destroyed part of downtown.  The designn of the building, with its beautiful details, reflects a mid-Atlantic sensibility.  Originally, the cupola and roof were a beautiful verdigris copper, replaced in recent years by the deadly brown now seen, and the building was given a certain insouciance with white shutters, now long gone.  

Uphill on State Street, bordering the Union River and overlooking the mostly brick downtown, is a small cluster of handsome civic buildings, with a magnificent Greek Revival Church rising above them.   

The first Congregational Church of Ellsworth, one of Maine's finest Greek revival buildings, designed in 1846 by Benjamin Deane of Bangor, and built by Thomas Lord, a talented carpenter/carver/architect from Blue Hill.

This is the scene that greeted me on a cold gray day, as I parked the car  at the courthouse to report for Jury Duty.  Not having a particularly criminal streak (well, beyond traffic offenses), I hadn't been in the main courtroom since my last time on jury duty about 20 years ago.  Up the wide flight of granite steps I went, and inside noted how utilitarian the interior is---no Tweed courthouse splendor for Down East Maine--no marble columns, no terrazzo floors, no central rotunda.  I climbed the very ordinary flight of stairs to the second floor, signed in, and walked into the courtroom, prepared for a very ordinary day. Instead, I saw evidence of a crime that wasn't on trial, but should have been.

The County Courthouse, also rebuilt after the fire.

A fragment of the original buff and marbelized black linoleum at the top of the stairs, meeting the institutional tan linoleum that has replaced it in the corridors.  I've reached an age where I realize that very few things ever get better in older buildings.

  The courtroom is a handsome room---very Ogden Codman in its details, paired Corinthian pilasters flanking tall arched windows, and a handsome cornice.  The last time saw the room, it was an institutional beige (or was it gray?), with long straight dark green curtains of the fireproof variety (or were they maroon?) .  Dignified, dull.  Well kiddies,  that was last time.

This time, what greeted me was a perky color scheme of pink and white, with green carpeting, and most gobsmacking of all, floral curtains.  It wasn't quite what I was expecting.  God knows how, God knows why, but the Maine District courtroom had been cheerily redecorated in best bed and breakfast style--or at least what I think of as bed & breakfast style.  You actually couldn't pay the Dilettante to stay in a bed & breakfast. Well, maybe if it were in Venice.  But you'd have to buy the ticket too.  But I digress:  The pink was that Gawd awful pink, hovering between dusty rose and dried Pepto, that was popular in all the worst waiting rooms and mid-range hotels 20 years ago.

The trim and molding were a very creamy ivory white.  The cheap carpet was a shade of green that doesn't occur in nature.  Holding it all together were those curtains.  Oh yes, those curtains--unlined, in a chintz pattern of dogwood in blush pink and green on an ivory ground, they were the glue that held this remarkable scheme together. They were very perky, tied back with jaunty insouciance.  I hate perky, although I'll tolerate insouciance just because I like saying it.  I don't know who manufactured the fabric, but I can safely guess that it wasn't Brunschwig et Fils.  These looked as if they had been bought in bulk at a sheet sale at Macy's--20 years ago (um, not that I'd know, of course...).  Whoever had done this had even hung a pair of those curtains in the shallow arched recess behind the judge's chair. So much for the dignity of the court.

Two false windows in the courtroom are elegantly mirrored to maintain continuity in the design giving a rather  ballroom atmosphere.  The mystery, however, is why these false windows have roller shades, when the real windows don't?  The evidence is inconclusive. The other mystery is why, when three windows were blocked by expansion beyond, they were merely covered with plywood, rather than mirror paned also.  Things really don't improve when old buildings are altered.

This was definitely a 'What Were They Thinking?' moment, and curious, I asked around, but could not find out who the guilty party was.  Maybe a judge's wife---'Honey, I know just the thing to brighten up that dreary old courtroom of yours'----or the wife of a county commissioner, maybe?   But that's just hearsay and speculation.  Not enough for a jury to convict---it may have even been a professional job---but whoever is guilty, they forgot Elsie de Wolfe's first rule:  "Suitability, suitability, suitability".

The judge may not be given to flowery statements, but the curtains behind his bench are another matter

The evidence is overwhelming.  I pronounce the defendant guilty of Decorating Under the Influence.

Building by the Book

My last post,  about the Pierce mansion in Portsmouth, with its lovely hall, brought comments about the complexities involved in building a such a staircase.   It does seem to be a lost art, with even high end designers and builders taking shortcuts that result in something flat and unsatisfactory.  I remember a having a conversation with the stair builder on a oversized 'colonial' style house being built near where I lived 30 years ago.  The house was a huge affair, designed for a fairly demanding client..   One of her desires was a grand curving staircase, a nearly universal symbol of architectural elegance and glamor.  A stair was designed, and like the one in the Pierce mansion, it was recessed in a wall between two doors.  The effect, however (in fairness partly the fault of the exuberant interior decoration), falls far short of the Pierce staircase.. The craftsman who built the stairs told me at the time that there were many issues----the architect had not done the math properly, and the stairs in building would not actually land in the proper place.  Many adjustments had to be made in the course of construction, and the result, as you can see below was better than many modern circular stairs, but far short of what was being done in earlier times.

The very stair in question, looking better than it really is through a fisheye lense.  Best not to think to much about the decor.  It was the 80's.  The program was ambitious.  This is actually one of the more calmly decorated spaces in the house.

And this opens up one of the anomalies of modern design and building.  The architect in question had completed four years of one of the best architectural schools in the country, and acquired undeniable design skills, and had had endless training in mathematics and geometry.  Yet he couldn't come up with a proper curving staircase, one that swept in a graceful gravity defying curve to the second floor.   We see it all the time now----graceless stairways, ill proportioned Palladian, or as builders and realtors like to call them, Palladium, windows are a stock standard of 'traditional' home designs.  The house above also has one of those ill designed windows, but that's not where this post is headed, so I'll leave that for another day.

The curving staircase at Woodlawn

The anamoly is that 200 hundred years ago, in a country with relatively primitive technologies, self trained carpenter/architects, often with limited education, were routinely creating graceful, well ordered buildings using no more than their eye, and the building conventions of the time, aided by several popular builders manuals, chief among them those of Asher Benjamin.   Here is an excellent case study, the John Black house, Woodlawn, here Down East in Ellsworth, Maine, designed from Plate 54 of Asher Benjamin's American Builder's Companion.

Plate 54 From The American Builder's Companion, published in 1816, inspiration for Woodlawn.

Woodlawn, as built in 1827

John Black was an Englishman, who had been recommended for the position of secretary to one of Washington's Generals, David Cobb, who after the Revolution had come Down East as agent for the Bingham family, who had recently purchased 2,000,000 acres of Maine with an eye to development.  Black had been recommended to Cobb by the Barings of Barings bank, who also had a stake in the Maine lands.  He did well in his job, in due course married Cobb's daughter, and succeeded his father-in-law as the Bingham's agent.   Black became the leading citizen of the area, and in 1827, his fortune secure, he set about to build a house on a hill outside Ellsworth.

 

 One of Benjamin's drawings showing how to calculate the geometry of a winding stair

and below, some notes on the building of stairs

An architect could have been summoned from the city, given Black's cosmopolitanism and wealth, but instead, he chose a local builder with talent for design, Seth Tisdale, and together, they created an elegant, and for the time, modern, house with a revolutionary side hall plan.   And how did they do this?  They took a plate from the 1816 edition of Asher Benjamin's American Builder's companion, customized it with details from the book, ordered brick from Philadelphia, and some time later, they had built what was in those times the then grandest house in eastern Maine, elegant, gracefully proportioned, with one of the loveliest  curved stairs to survive from that era---all using the helpful instructions of Asher Benjamin.  In fact, with the graceful semicircular stair, they did Benjamin one better, replacing the straight upper landing with an s-curve that neatly completes the circle.  I don't have a picture available, but the transition of the scrolled stair bracket decoration to the upper landing facing is virtuosic.  

 

 The Ionic portico at Woodlawn, with cornice and capitals copied from Benjamin

 Most of Woodlawn's lovely details, railings, door casings, mantels, balustrades, interior shutters, can all be traced to designs chosen from Benjamin's book, and the finished result shows just how far a talented builder could go, with a set of rules to follow in gauging proportion and detail.  In copying Benjamin's design, the floorplan was followed exactly, but the elevation was tweaked, with triple hung windows reaching to the floor from the drawing rooms, and portico along the front of the central block. What a huge difference from today's builder houses, with their 'one of everything' from the window catalog.  What we have lost from average building in recent years is proportion and grace, whatever architectural style is being essayed.

 Woodlawn in 1936

I can think of a dozen other houses around here from the early 19th century with surprisingly lovely  and sophisticated staircases---the Ruggles House at Columbia falls is a particularly fine example---and so it remains until the 1940's.   And from then on, I cannot think of a house, no matter how well designed, or expensive, that has a really worthy stair.   It's a mystery to me.

John Black's grandson, George Nixon Black, who used the house only in the spring and fall, died in 1927, leaving Woodlawn, its expansive park-like grounds, and three generations of family furnishings to the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations, who administer it as a house museum and park.  The house's lovely furnishings are as Mr. Black left them in 1927.   For more information, visit the Woodlawn website   http://www.woodlawnmuseum.com/  It is one of half a dozen exceptional historic houses to be visited in this region.

Incidentally, the last Mr. Black, in addition to his munificent gift of Woodlawn to down east Maine, was also a major benefactor of the American collections at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, has also achieved immortality in architectural history for having commissioned one of the most admired houses of the shingle style, his summer home at Manchester Massachusetts, designed by Peabody & Stearns.  This is definitely not a house out of the pattern books, and is a virtuoso performance by  young architects at the beginning of their successful practice.  Kragsyde was demolished in 1929, two years after Black's death, but interestingly, a copy has been built, reversed from the original plans, on Swan's Island, not 25 miles from Woodlawn.

Kragsyde, George Nixon Black's summer home

Photo Credits:  Color Photos by Dilettante or from Woodlawn website, black & white photos of Woodlawn from Historic American Buildings Survey.  Staircase 1 from Sotheby's Realty