TWO DAYS BEFORE (AS SEEN ONE DAY AFTER)

I'm working on two of my usual sorts of posts, but I'm suffering from the after-effects of a little to much food, candy, wine, and general holiday cheer this morning, so you'll have to wait.  Overeating was a problem this fall as colder weather set, but I am happy to report that after the last few days, I finally have had enough food.  Way enough.

The local Historical Society's 1815 house, decorated for its Holiday open house.  The wallpaper is an Adelphi reproduction of an early 19th century paper found in another local house (Click HERE for more).  The ship in the painting, the 'Ranger', was built only a few dozen feet from this room.

 At dinner last night, over smoked salmon and crab mousse, friends and I were commenting about the relative lack of Holiday decorations around town this year.   Was it an effect of the poor economy, or was it because our village suffers from a surfeit of 'Good Taste', and therefore people are too timid to put on a display that doesn't involve more than a few white twinkle lights--here the Dilettante confesses that no matter how much 'Good Taste' he may suffer from the rest of the year, he does love the occasional over the top  kid-pleasing, crowd-pleasing, awe-inspring Christmas light display.  Nothing says Christmas like electric Santas visible from space.

The local bookstore after the rush.  Earlier, the counter was a frenzy of gift-wrapping .  For those who don't have a good independent bookstore nearby, I can only say I'm so sorry.

For me, the Christmas shopping season begins not on the Friday after Thanksgiving, but on the 23rd of December.  If only the canned Christmas music that has accompanied my daily errands in stores for the last six weeks would wait that long, the world would be a better place.  

Without, a local restaurant in the former blacksmith shop (click HERE for more) had almost the only bright lights on Main St.  Within, a bartender wearing a Santa hat was ready with two martinis for us.  That's my idea of a Santa.

At the other end of the Christmas decorating spectrum was the sweet, restrained Charlie Brown tree at the local Library.  Under it were placed donated presents to be taken later to the area homeless shelters.  Beneath the gloss of affluence that veneers our area, shelter occupancy and food pantry demand are at an all time high, even as our accidental Governor, although once homeless himself, continues to demonize the poor.

 In this part of Maine, the biggest Santa this season has been Stephen King.  His output of horror stories belie a very generous man, who has given tens of millions to this region, in the most thoughtful and personal of ways.  Click HERE for that story.

The Fairest of Them All: Hamilton House, Then & Now

 Hamilton House as it appeared when purchased by the Tysons in the late 1890s  Unusually for an early New England house, there are three facades, of which these are the back (land) and kitchen fronts.  The door on the river facade would have been the main entrance in the 18th century.

Hamilton House, in South Berwick, Maine, is one of the loveliest--and most romantic-- properties imaginable.  Set on a bluff at the head of the Salmon Falls River and backed by rolling meadows and woodlands, it is an Arcadian ideal brought to life. A large, simple Georgian inspired house built in 1785 by Jonathan Hamilton a West Indies trader, and in his day part of a bustling settlement overlooking his busy wharves,  it had fallen on hard times by the late 19th century.  Enter the Tysons, persuaded by their friend Sarah Orne Jewett, who had based her novel The Tory Lover at Hamilton House, to buy it and restore it.  Emily Tyson was the widow of the president of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, and she and her stepdaughter Elise set about 'restoring' Hamilton House to a glory that far exceeded its earlier life.

The approach to Hamilton house is beautifully orchestrated to heighten the sense of remoteness and traveling back in time.  One leaves the highway for a country road, and in turn leaves that road for a narrow country lane, which ends at the simple gate to the driveway, merely two cart tracks, at which one gets first glimpse of the house.

The Tyson's domestic needs were greater than those of Jonathan Hamilton.'s day.  Their renovation architect, Bostonian Herbert Browne, an early proponent of the Colonial revival, also practiced in a grand baroque style that bordered on lunacy (more about that in an upcoming post).  He exercised restraint here, adding two low wings (since removed) , one for services, one a porch and first floor bedroom, fronting both with neo-classical treillage covered in vines to make them appear to be open porches.  Even as many of their peers were erecting large houses in the fashionable seaside resorts a dozen miles to the south on the coast, the ladies Tyson were part of another movement, one that eschewed fashion in favor of romantic simplicity.

As one approaches the house, the drive is paved with flagstones, leading to a flagged circle in the grass near the house, a firm rebuke to all those McMansion forecourts with fountain in the center

Jonathan Hamilton's barn was moved, and a lovely sunken garden was built in its foundations, with a shady pergola, now lost, bordering the river bluff and framing the views.  In the house, with its large and well proportioned rooms, few architectural changes were made.  Taking their cues from the relative simplicity of the interiors, decoration was light and airy---white ruffled or chintz curtains, painted furniture, straw matting, cheerful old fashioned wallpapers---the principles of Elsie deWolfe applied to a colonial inspired design. 

  In the hall, scraps of the original English 'pillar and arch' pattern wallpaper were found, and the Tysons had it reproduced, probably the earliest instance of in America of an historic wallpaper being reproduced in situ.

 Hamilton House as enlarged for the Tysons by architect Herbert Browne (Tyson family photographs, SPNEA)

Loggia added by the Tysons

A garden house was built soon after, using elements salvaged from the early 18th century Sally Hart house in Newmarket, NH.   This building combined the materials and sensibility of an early American house with the picturesque quality of a 16th century English cottage.

The garden house

Their creation complete, the Tysons sat back and enjoyed the acclaim as visitors arrived. And what visitors: One day Isabella Stewart Gardner and Henry Davis Sleeper, her summer neighbor on Eastern Point in Gloucester, MA, who had recently built an English arts and crafts style cottage there, motored up from the North Shore.  And what they saw at Hamilton House was to have a profound effect on the story of interior design for the next 75 years.

 A corner in the garden house.  This mix of early architectural salvage and carefully and romantically arranged antiques was something very new and fresh in the early 1900s. (Max Weber photograph, originally published in House Beautiful, 1926)

Sleeper was riveted by the Tyson's collections of hooked rugs, colored glass cued to the decorative schemes of each room, old fashioned furniture, and old prints and objects, all composed in lovely arrangements..  Most of all, he was riveted by the garden house.  On the drive up to South Berwick, the party had noticed an ancient house being demolished in Essex, Upon return, Sleeper bought that house, and began incorporating the salvage into his own house, decorating it brilliantly with furnishings like those he had seen at Hamilton House that summer afternoon.   Sleeper's work at Beauport caught the eye of Henry Francis Dupont, who hired him to do up a huge house at Southampton, which in turn begat Dupont's Winterthur, which house, along with the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, did so much to begat the much more correct and dull version of 18th century American Georgian that dominated a certain sort of WASP taste through the 1970's.  But, I am wandering from my subject.  Back we go.

 The dining room, with murals by George Porter Fernald.  The use of humble painted chairs with fine mahogany furniture was also new and fresh, and demonstrates the Tyson's talent at the game of high and low.

A few years after completion of their initial decorative schemes, the Tysons had the inspired genius to ask George Porter Fernald, an artist from nearby Portsmouth who had already created charming painted valances for the windows, and had painted some furniture for them,  to paint over their leafy floral wallpapers in the drawing and dining rooms.

 The Drawing Room Murals, with idealized views of the Pisquataqua region.  The leaves and trees survive from the wallpaper over which the murals were painted

 In the drawing room, he painted scenes of famous buildings of the area  Charmingly, the murals incorporated leaves and trees from the existing wallpaper.  In the dining room, a classical landscape, reminiscent of scenic wallpapers, made for one of the loveliest rooms of its time.  Porter ran the horizon of the mural to echo that outside, and captured exactly the colors of the outside landscape on a summer day.  The distinctions between outside and inside thus blurred, a visual poetry was achieved.  Of the many beautiful rooms in every style that I've been in, this is one of the loveliest of all. 

The dining room as it appears today.  The painted valance boards are a little slice of heaven.

After Mrs. Tyson's death her stepdaughter, by now Mrs. Henry Vaughan, continued to occupy Hamilton House in the summer. In 1946 she left the estate to the  Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA), now unfortunately renamed  "Historic New England.  Hamilton House was part of a larger movement in American culture and aesthetics, and is one of the best surviving examples of Colonial Revival decoration, its interiors now carefully restored to the early 1900s scheme.  Most of the pictures below are from a late afternoon, late summer visit that I made this year, interspersed with a few photographs originally published in House Beautiful in 1926,    The garden house will be featured in an upcoming post.

The door on the riverfront, inspired by English Builder's books, with stone terrace and grindstone added by the Tysons

 And the view from that door

The side door originally opened to a hall, now an extension to the dining room, with views to the sunken garden

The back door, now the main entrance, with sidelights added to the original central motif by Herbert Browne

 The view from that door. Old fashioned Loveliness abounds in every direction

The arched doors of the carriage shed, with wonderful classical detail over, applied simply to the board siding (sadly, this arch was covered with square doors)

 The cross axis of the garden from the carriage shed in 1926, and now

 Main Garden axis toward house, 1926 and now (photo from Virtual Tourist Berwick)

Provenance, Taste, Moving Houses, and the Sad Tale of a Beautiful Wallpaper

After 25 years in the antiques trade, many beautiful pieces have crossed my path. Most arrive having long since lost their stories, but occasionally a piece comes through with a history, a provenance, intact to enhances its beauty. This romantic wallpaper screen is such a piece.

The wallpaper was part of a set hand painted in the late 18th century by an anonymous artist, and originally used in a chateau in France. The sweeping panorama depicts a nautical theme, with fishermen tending their nets on shore, and ships plying the sea in the distance. The colors are rich and saturated, age having only deepened the intensity.  Eventually the set found its way to America, where because of its large scale, it was divided into two sets. One half was purchased by collector Electra Havemeyer Webb, who hung it in one of the early houses she had moved to her husband's family land to form the Shelburne Museum, intending to evoke a fantasy of a rich sea captain retired to the very un-nautical environs of Vermont.

 A panel from the set may be seen at the left in this 1960's view  of the parlor in Vermont House at Shelburne Museum

The other set was purchased in 1948 by Mrs. Ambrose Cramer, the daughter of Arthur Meeker, head of the Armour meat packing concern in Chicago, and sister of writer Arthur Meeker Jr. She and her architect husband, who had worked in David Adler's office, after many years living abroad, had purchased an attractive Greek Revival sea captain's house in Rockport village, which they then moved to a lovely setting on the harbor, reworking the floor plan completely to create an elegant summer house, while maintaining the integrity of the exterior. Of elegant and cosmopolitan tastes, the Cramers filled their house with soigné possessions from their European life---Italian and French neoclassical furniture and faiences, an 18th century Bossi work mantel in green and white---and the wallpaper murals in the dining room, their painted European bays and shores echoing the Maine waters just outside the windows.

Mary Meeker Cramer in the dining room of her house in Rockport, Maine, c. 1984. The screen can be seen in the left background. The table and sideboard are set with a lovely set of 18th century del Vecchio faience purchased by the Cramers on their honeymoon. (Photograph by Arnold Newman from Town & Country by way of Smilla4blogs) PS. the wall is not curved---it is the curvature of the magazine page. One of the Dilettante's pet peeves is photos across the binding gutter in books or magazines. Pay attention book designers!

The Cramers gave the house a polish that it had previously never aspired to. Proud of their lovely creation, they placed it on the National Register of Historic Places. Unfortunately a National Register listing has few teeth, and after Mrs. Cramer's death, the contents went up at auction, including the screen, separated from its paper in the dining room, luckily, as things transpired. The house was sold to a tycoon on whom the scale and subtleties of the old Hanson House were lost. Down came the house, and up went the predictable gargantuan and overwrought McMansion by the sea. A salvage dealer from Rockland saved the mantels (only to shatter the Bossi work mantel from careless handling), the porch columns, some doors, the 18th century chandeliers---and the dining room paper. Age had taken a toll on the paper's condition, and careless handling exacerbated the situation. The salvage dealer also suffered from a mighty case of hubris, and became so convinced of the paper's value that he rejected all estimates from the major auction houses, even while the paper continued to deteriorate, and after a break up, it apparently went to auction in upstate New York, and failing to sell, back to his ex-girlfriend's barn. At the auction I bought everything I could of the Cramer's lovely things---the screen graced the shop for only a couple of days before heading to a new home on Cape Cod.

(Moving houses and equipping dining rooms with scenic papers were both favorite pastimes of Rockport summer residents. Click here for another example. And for a link to a real estate video about another Cramer farmhouse renovation, with yet another dining room with scenic paper, click here.)

The Hanson house, as originally built before remodeling by Ambrose Cramer (Historic American Buildings Survey)

The house as remodelled by Ambrose Cramer for himself, after moving it to a shorefront setting in Rockport (HABS)

The original floorplan, with a tiny curved staircase immediately inside the front door (HABS)

The floorplan as remodeled by the Cramers, with a hall running straight through to the ocean front, and a large drawing room in one wing, and the dining room with the wallpaper in the left wing (HABS)

Ambrose Cramer was the very model of a gentleman architect. He grew up in a grand house built for his industrialist father in Lake Forest, married an heiress, and combined a distinguished manner with superb taste. In Maine he became a major force in the historic preservation movement.  He cut his professional teeth in the office of the great David Adler, and worked on several of Adler's greatest commissions, including the Cape Dutch house in Lake Forest for the Richard Bentleys. In 1929, Cramer designed one of his most famous works, in a more literal translation of the Cape Dutch style, Constantia, a winter home for his parents-in-law in Montecito California.

Constantia, the Montecito house designed by Cramer for his in-laws, the Arthur Meekers 

Wallpaper: Adelphi Down East

In Blue Hill, Maine, the graceful house built in by Jeremiah Thorndike Holt, influenced by the designs of Asher Benjamin, has over looked the tiny village square---triangle, really---since 1818.  For the last forty years, it has been the home of the local Historical Society, who display there the artifacts that bring to life the town's past.

Holt House in 1824, detail from Morning View of Blue Hill Village, by Jonathan Fisher

Barely altered since original construction, the house required only minor repairs and redecoration when purchased by the Historical Society.   This decoration reflected the taste of the era in historic interiors.  The showpiece of the Holt's 'mansion house' was the parlor, with wordwork carved with a rope motif, and recessed window embrasures with folding shutters.   Paint scraping at the time indicated a green-ish paint, and a drab dark olive color was chosen.   These scrapings also determined the interesting fact that the skirting boards in the room had been painted with what the restorer referred to as 'cart wheel blue'.  Sadly, it was decided, in the interest of 'good taste', not to replicate this scheme.  A modern commercial wallpaper in a 'colonial' design was used absent resources for a more appropriate paper.

The Holts, shipowners, suffered reverses soon after the house was completed, and a leaded glass fanlight was never installed in the space over the front door.  Instead, the fan is a board, with a spiderweb grid of lathing applied, painted black, with gilt circles, to imitate a glass fanlight---a most charming economy.

Last year, the parlor decoration was showing its age, and the house committee, under the leadership of Susan Gurin, decided to undertake a new interpretation for the room.   A person who had been a member of the original committee 40 years previously remembered the 'cart wheel blue' reference, and a scraping determined that indeed not only was the skirting board originally blue, but also the floor.   New scrapings of the woodwork, with new knowledge of how paint ages, indicated that actually the greenish hue was due to the deterioration of oils in the original pigment, and that the woodwork was likelier a 'stone' color, fashionable in the early 1800's.   The wallpaper was removed, and the room re-painted in this color scheme.  The transformation was remarkable---the blue floor echoed the harbor only a few dozen feet from the parlor, and the off white paint showed the woodwork to best advantage.   Now the question remained:  What to do about the walls?  What would be appropriate?

 The Holt House parlor, in its olive green phase

As it happened, 30 ago, when another house in the village, built in 1803 and occupied by Matthew Ray, a toolmaker, was being re-wired, it was discovered that hidden behind the later Greek Revival woodwork and walls installed in during an 1840's remodeling, the original Federal parlor and original decorative scheme were intact, down to woodwork wallpaper and paint colors.  The wallpaper appeared to date from around 1815, and was probably manufactured in Boston.  It was a boldly designed neo-classical stripe, with an elaborate floral border. The paper was probably printed in Boston, and was made from large square sheets rather than rolls, as modern paper is.  The border, more finely printed, appears to be of French manufacture, a reminder that expensive and fashionable goods were available up here even at that early date for those who could afford them.  Although it was impractical to completely uncover this time capsule, samples of the wallpaper were rescued and saved.

After viewing commercially available period designs, the Historical Society decided to reproduce this wallpaper, a surviving example of the the taste and goods available in the town in the early 1800's.   But how to reproduce it?  Enter the amazing firm of Adelphi Paper Hangings, makers of authentic block printed wallpapers.  Steve Larson of Adelphi was contacted, estimates were made, and the Historical Society decided to take the bold step.   Fundraising was undertaken, with rolls available for adoption at the exact figure of $378.00 per, and they were snapped up by generous members of the community.

A Sample of the original paper, printed on square sheets of paper, above, and a section of the border, probably French, below

The original paper was block printed, probably in Boston, on square sheets of paper.  The design was very unusual, with an overall foliate scroll rendered in three colors in stripes of varying width.  The border, which economics prevents from reproduction at this time, was a multicolor floral of French manufacture, showing the stylish goods that were available on the Eastern Frontier even at that early date.  

A workman at Adelphi pulls a strike-off of the reproduced paper from one of the three carved blocks used to produce the design

The sample has remarkable fidelity to the original

Printing blocks were hand-carved by Adelphi's craftsmen, colors were matched (one section of the  original paper retained particularly clean and bright samples), and only a few days ago, the samples were pulled and approved, and within weeks the paper was complete.   The first sample was taped up a few days ago and approved, and within the next weeks, the parlor will greet visitors for the summer, with its original blue & white paint scheme enhanced by a handmade reproduction wallpaper in a pattern familiar to earlier residents of the town.

 

The parlor, restored to 'stone' colored woodwork, bare plaster walls awaiting the new wallpaper.  Notice the blue floor and skirting boards, the original color scheme

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The sample is hung on the wall. The paper will be hung above the dado only.  The two gilt framed lithographs of Italian Ports were brought back as mementoes by a Blue Hill sea captain in the1840's.

Adelphi will be adding the design to their catalog, tentatively called 'Blue Hill Fancy Stripe'.  While the Dilettante makes the disclaimer that he in no way has commercial affiliation with the wonderful company, he would be delighted to see the paper sell well so the Historical Society can benefit from royalties.

The Holt House is located on Water Street in Blue Hill Village, a National Register Historic District, and is open to the public during the summer:  Tuesdays and Fridays: 1-4 PM; Saturdays 11 AM to 2 PM

And for those who cannot get enough Dilettante, or even those who get a little too much, I can be found in print, not once, but twice in the July issue of Portland Magazine, holding forth on a famous modernist house on Mt. Desert (click HERE) , and  about scenic wallpapers in Maine houses (click HERE).

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have some dry wall to prime, or my new store will never be ready.