OLD HOUSES THREATENED BY FADS

                                                    HAVE YOU NOTICED THESE TRENDS?

Times are changing!  Antique houses and historic building are in jeopardy. Here are examples of what is impairing them, some much more serious than others.  If only cosmetics are involved...OK.  When original fabric is involved it is not so OK.

For nearly fifty years I have gone on antique house tours from Maine to Florida and elsewhere in between.  They followed the same scenario.  Visitors were greeted at the front door and admired the hall and staircase before being directed into the front rooms.  The visitors admired traditional parlors usually with a fireplace, a Chippendale sofa, wing chairs and Martha Washington lolling chairs.  Oriental rugs covered the floor; swags and jabots adorned the small paned windows.

In the dining room the table was usually set fit for a queen with the fine china, sterling silver tableware and maybe some Waterford crystal glasses.  Sometime you were allowed upstairs and sometimes not but the entire first floor was on display.  Often less formal country kitchens welcomed you to the rear of the house.  Occasionally  there was an antique cast iron Glenwood or Crawford range or cook stove that was the pride of the homeowner especially if it could be used.  Butcher block was often the counter of choice in an old house kitchen.

After many years of being inspired by lovely and interesting houses, not all of them as formal as I just described I would return home; sometimes inspired and other times with feelings of hopelessness, thinking everything I owned in my house had to go.

Once when I lived in Newburyport, MA my own house was on a tour.  It was a lot of work but heart warming too as people admired things and for a number of years afterwards when I would be introduced to someone they would remark about things they had seen in my house and remembered.  It was mostly a positive experience.

After so many years of touring I became less eager to go.   Maybe it was really my worn out knees and I didn't want to admit that all of the stairs and in and out of the car were killing me.

Recently, for the first time in years I agreed to go on a tour of mostly antique houses.  Some of the houses I was familiar with and others I would be seeing for the first time.

As a friend and I approached the first house we were directed around to the back of the house but with lovely landscaping it was a treat.  When we entered the house we had to take off our shoes which was not a treat but a real pain.  I had not worn shoes that I could kick off easily but I complied.  We then entered the kitchen.  Treacherously shiny, slippery floors greeted us.  But here is the thing.  We were in the kitchen!  The back wall of the house had been opened up and an addition built in the rear.  We were in a huge space with the best of everything relative to cabinetry, appliances and granite counter tops.  This was the centerpiece of the house.  The dining room and parlor were anti climactic after seeing the "swell" kitchen.  

Both my friend and I were bored with the house.  It had lost its patina.  If I hadn't known better I would have thought I was in a reproduction house.  It was pristine!  And was billed as a 17th century house which it was not.  The given date would have made it one of the five oldest houses in America.  Not!

We continued on to the second house.  Once again we were shuffled around to the back door.  What was going on?  More of the same.  Walls had been removed to create the ultimate kitchen.  Everything was expensive and sparkling.  What the parlor and dining room looked like I hardly noticed.

On to the next house and  the same scenario again.  In the back door, walls removed to create a large space,  appliances nearly commercial grade.  Was this the quaint old house I had always admired?

We didn't finish the tour.  It was disturbing to hardly recognize these houses with their shiny surfaces, not an imperfection to be found.  How can that be in an almost three hundred year old house?

Open spaces, missing walls, and scraped, sanded and polished spaces are in.  Guests enter by the kitchen door because the enlarged kitchens have taken center stage.  Antique houses are being threatened by this latest craze.  As I predicted elsewhere, the day will come when the hostess or the housewife will get tired of everyone hanging around her while she prepares a meal and surely closed kitchens will have their day once again but how much damage is being done? Sanded and urethaned floors and expensive stoves with enough burners to run a restaurant are the style of the day!  If that's what you want, folks, build a repro.

The experience was disturbing and I came home, not feeling inspired, but feeling troubled.  The houses is saw could have passed for repros and I wished that the owners had built themselves new houses and left their antique houses alone.

I must not leave out the fad for exposing beams in the ceiling never supposed to be seen by human eyes once the house is built.  Old time housewrights must be rolling in their graves to see their rough adzed beams being displayed in an otherwise nice room.  Most houses were not rustic cabins but refined houses.  I covered that subject in a blog post recently and there was an unprecedented number of readers and responders.  Here is the link to that blog post in case you didn't see it.

https://prudencefish.blogspot.com/2017/08/beams-beams-and-more-beams.html

A fairly formal dining room but where is the plastered ceiling?  These crude beams were not meant for human eyes.

Another threat to old houses presents a much more serious dilemma.  It is lead paint.

For many years removing lead paint posed more of a threat than leaving it alone.  

Anyone born in the late 1970s or before has probably been exposed to lead paint.  New England houses are very apt to be a lot older then the 70s.  I have not been very sympathetic to those calling for the removal of lead paint in our houses.  It is disruptive, expensive and is a real threat to antique houses.  I have sincerely doubted that children were chewing on any part of the house.  It has always seemed to me that painted furniture or other old or antique objects that people have lying around or accessorizing their homes were much more apt to be the culprit.  A toddler might bite on the arm of a chair or any antique ornament on a low table such as families of old houses collect.

I just heard that a family I know with a precious one year old baby have discovered that the baby has elevated lead levels.  These are very conscientious parents and they also love their 200 year old house.  They are going to be moving out of their house for six weeks while their lovely old center chimney house has all traces of lead paint removed.  This is drastic and tragic for the interruption in their lives and the assault on their house and the expenditure.  But I understand the pressure they feel to remove harmful elements from their baby's environment especially if the state gets involved.

This couple think that the threat is coming from the painted floors.  When I mentioned the situation to a friend whose middle aged children are the same age as mine her immediate response was that we kept our kids in playpens and they didn't crawl around on the floors.  And most rooms had some sort of rug.  I really hadn't thought about play pens and if they are no longer in use why not?  Checking online I see that they are available.  Since these days I am not usually in houses with babies I'm curious if there has been a decline in the use of playpens as my friend suggests leaving more babies to crawl around on the floor investigating their surroundings.

Children must be protected but deleading an entire house is a drastic measure.  Perhaps I don't know how many children have high levels.  Surely most of us and most of our kids if born before lead paint was outlawed didn't even consider that our children were in jeopardy and I'm not convinced that they were.  Would it not be more likely that a child would mostly be apt to put an object in their mouth that they could pick up and hold in their hands?  Any object that is painted could be a culprit.  And what about novelty items that have come from other countries and sold here that aren't antique?

Once a child has been diagnosed something drastic has to be done and it is somewhat out of the homeowner's hands.  Going the route of encapsulating the painted surfaces seems a better way to go but perhaps there is no choice once the state is involved.

There is another threat to an old house and it doesn't have to be that old!

Everywhere I go I can usually see an insulator's truck parked at yet another house that is getting insulation blown into the walls.   Without a vapor barrier which old houses do not have the home owner could be headed for trouble down the road.  Without a vapor barrier the insulation gets wet, holds water and becomes a soggy mess and it's just a matter of time until it starts to impair the integrity of the framework of the house as the wood is constantly exposed to the wet insulation.

A house with no vapor barrier and no insulation is able to breath.  We have huge numbers of old houses in New England that might not still be here if they had blown-in insulation suffocating them.  One inspector claimed that 80% of the houses he inspected with blown in insulation had damage.  

This guy is insulating an attic floor.  That is good.  Walls are bad.

Another current trend is only temporarily detrimental because it is cosmetic.  It is when changes can't be reversed that there real trouble.  Here I'm talking about wallpaper and that obviously is cosmetic and not really damaging to the house.

By the 19th century there were numerous paper stainers and wallpaper was readily available.  Here in New England in the 19th century wallpaper decorated most rooms.  I have been told that in warmer climates there is an insect problem with wallpaper and  its paste thus not seen in the South as frequently.  

Wallpaper, for the most part, is out of favor.  It has been replaced by white paint throughout the house.  Not only is this not accurate treatment in an old house but it is boring. "Less is More" promoted by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the 20th century has nothing to do with period decorating in an old house.  The white on white treatment has found its way into the decorating fads of the our country perhaps in part inspired by HGTV.  I will be so glad when this fad becomes history which it will.

Here is a wallpapered room in Hamilton House in South Berwick, Maine.  What could be more charming.  No white walls here.  I love this room!

White paint prevails everywhere.

There is one other color in vogue that you may not have heard of but it is making a fashion statement these days in houses of all ages and styles.  The word is"griege" It is defined like this.

The name might sound exotic, but greige is actually an amalgamation of two words; gray and beige. Most shades of greige are stronger on the gray than beige. But if you look closer, you will notice brownish undertones merging with the neutral gray color.

So now  you know what greige is, but will you know it when you see it?

But here is what is really getting my dander up these days!  Three times in the last week or two while looking at listings of antique houses for sale I have been floored by broker comments.

These listings describe beautifully the features and details of  what appear to be great "turn-key" houses until you get to the last sentence in the description.  "This house needs total renovation"  That is the conclusion of the broker for the house at  325 Main St. in historic Concord, MA and the same sentiment expressed for a beautiful brick house built at 1 Metcalf St. in Worcester, MA in 1939.
Here they are.

Concord, MA 1767

"Bring your creative eye...this property needs a complete renovation."  says the listing.  What in the world are they talking about.  A kitchen island with granite?

Worcester, MA 1939

 "A Total Rehab"  claims the listing agent.  Does total rehab mean sanding a couple of oak floors and taking down some faded wallpaper?

Gloucester, MA, Mid 18th century

"Raze the existing dwelling and rebuild upon 13,000 square feet"  proclaims this Gloucester listing.  This house is tired but does it have to be bulldozed?  It is an historic house.  To read more about Cape  Ann Cottages, follow this link.

https://prudencefish.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-18th-century-cottages-of-cape-ann.html

This has to be just the tip of the iceberg.  What a senseless attack on our inventory of traditional and antique houses.  When the "throw away society" that we live in comes down to throwing away significant houses something needs to be done.

For a long time I ran classes for real estate "professionals" trying to educate them to recognize period styles and how to go about selling them.  I reached a lot of people but it wasn't enough and what they learned didn't always stick.  And with the high attrition rate of real estate brokers many of the ones I did reach have moved on to other careers or retirement.  If you sell cars or pots and pans you have to know your product.  Not so in the real estate industry.  Just about everything else involving the sale of the house takes priority over the age and the history.  Misrepresentation is rampant when it comes to describing the house and particularly dating the house.

The Concord house comes with this glowing description before the announcement, the grand finale, that it needs complete renovation.  Read this about the house:

Offered for the 1st time since 1949 & paired w a generous 3/4A lot coupled w a Concord Ctr location, this Samuel Jones House c. 1767 provides exciting opportunities to bring a pure, unspoiled antique gem back to life. Tracing its roots to the dawn of Independence, this property is steeped in history (see attachment). Residents include famed poet & journalist William Ellery Channing, friend & 1st biographer to Henry David Thoreau as well as Franklin Sanborn, educator & ardent abolitionist who offered safe passage to fugitive slaves along the Underground RR. Current owners have painstakingly restored the house to reflect its original roots. Hndmade nails & hardware, original millwork, exposed beams, charming window seats, built-in cabinet & striking raised paneling over fp. Bring your creative eye...this property needs a complete renovation. Possible 2nd dwelling exists w approvals. 

I am not even going to start in on the subject of replacement windows and the ensuing damage to the integrity of the antique house.  This could be called a scam.  They have no business being installed in an antique house.  Windows could be the entire subject of a post maybe left for another day.

So don't get taken in by these fads and trends.  They will pass and you don't want to be left with an impaired house because some salesman talked you into insulation or new windows.  As I have already said, if you succumb to a fad that is reversible no real damage is done.  It is when original fabric is removed that changes become more serious.

Meanwhile, what can we do to stop this craziness and what do people really want in an old house.  Or in their heart of hearts maybe they don't even want an old house with its inevitable idiosyncrasies.

Enjoy the quirkiness of your old house, protect it and do thorough homework before you make changes.  And when you are no longer comfortable living in an antique with creaking floorboards and steep staircases, and not really devoted to that lifestyle,  give yourself permission to move on to something that is more to your liking.  



Post Script

Shocker of the day!  They seem to be turning up everywhere.  Once again, this is from Concord, MA, one of America's most historic towns, not only from its role in the Revolution ("the rude bridge that arched the flood")  but also for its literary contribution to America.  Henry David Thoreau,  Ralph Waldo Emerson,  Louisa May Alcott, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who didn't live in Concord but memorialized the 19th of April, 1775 in "Paul Revere's Ride".  These greats are associated with  Concord and are the names that quickly come to mind when you think of this town.

This fine house is priced at $1,565,000

The real estate ad describes it like this:

"Majestically sited on 2 buildable lots, this iconic Concord property is yours to renovate or start from scratch with your visionary design."  The price tag is $1,565,000.