Rural Restoration: The Porches—New and Improved

The restoration comedy continues as guest blogger, interior designer Carey Maloney, of M (Group) and his partner (who is doing most of the heavy lifting at this point), architect Hermes Mallea, research every detail of the once and future porches of their 1870 Hudson River house project.

Rural Intelligence Home and Garden
In the beginning, there were Porches. Now, alas, long gone. They were there in the 1920’s (above), partially gone by the 30’s (below) and then our info stops.
Now, we need them in place to execute the landscape and the hardscape. The new kitchen, opening onto the north porch, needs one, too. The excavation and building process will be a mess.

Readers, I hope I don’t disappoint, but this isn’t a slavish PBS-ish restoration, with us scraping bits of paint to have them analyzed or worrying over lattice dimensions that weren’t very good in the first place. We aim to make the porches to a new ideal (our ideal, granted): “New and Improved.” And I’m voting for no holds barred. If they deem it necessary, the Clients will provide the restraint; HM and I want to make this house to be formidable.

Rural Intelligence Home and Garden

HM, being an architect with a masters in historic preservation (read: Strict), attacked the project with his typical academic fervor. Me? I just watch and opine frequently, often without any informed basis for my opinions. The Clients supplied the photo (left) of the house in snow sans porches, from a 1930s Christmas card. Wow – two whole pictures! These constitute the sum of our original documents. Thin but better than nothing.

We then sought help from Hudson River Heritage—a resource we first discovered when we restored a great place in Rhinebeck (the Olmsted Brothers did the landscape. ’Nuf said.) They didn’t have info on this specific house but we added to our collection of bad copies of old photos of houses of the same era and approximate locale. All sources are useful. (And HM believes in images. Servers full of images…)

Rural Intelligence Home and Garden
Next we started the field trip phase (happily the farthest was 7 miles away). HM booked a visit to Montgomery Place (above), a grand house made even grander over a forty-year period in the mid-1800s first by Louise Livingston (native of Haiti—bet her taste was crazy—colonial and over-the-top romantic) and later by her daughter Coralie Barton, both working with the great Romantic Movement architect A. J. Davis. Montgomery Place is a Classical Revival house—with applied plaster and wood decorations plus flanking semi-circular porticos. Just a great house. The applied decorations are so chic. The exterior paint has sand in it for a stone texture—beyond chic. We measured, and photographed, and pondered.

Rural Intelligence Home and Garden Then we called all of our neighbors, immediately north or south, and did the same. Measure, compare, critique. It was a treat to visit under the aegis of “research.” “Can we come take photos and measure your house?” Six houses fell under our X-ray stares/raised eyebrows. “Odd choice,” HM muttered into his tape measure’s microphone—very Cuban Maxwell e-Smart. (Not that we are critical; ask anyone. Everyone will tell you,“They are not critical…”)

Armed with the information/inspiration gleaned from the neighbors, Hermes & Co. hit the drafting tables. Sketches were reviewed with The Clients, revisions made, balustrades debated over. We lobbied strongly (FYI - I can be A dog with A bone…) in favor of the upper balustrades. Granted, pricey (ouch)—but more finished, no? “In for a penny…”

There are lots of details to thrash out—from hard stuff like maximizing the height of the crawlspace underneath the porch (great potting/storage area) to the easy stuff like the color for the porch ceiling (pale sky blue, said to dissuade mosquitoes).

So more on the design phase soon, with drawings to show. Then once construction starts, we’ll break out the full-size mock ups of the bits and pieces. NEVER underestimate the value of Visuals. When in doubt, mock it up. In ‘real wood’ or kraft paper—size matters.

As to reference books, first up is Historic Houses of the Hudson Valley, a Dover Book (we LOVE Dover Books!) by Harold Donaldson Eberlein and Cortlandt Van Dyke Hubbard (huh? Say what?) Montgomery Place has pride of place on the cover.

Andrew J. Davis, architect, wrote a seminal (love that word) American design book— The Architecture of Country Houses and Dover publishes it. (See why we love Dover?) .

My final Dover plug. Every NYC library should have Dover’s classic New York’s Fabulous Luxury Apartments: with Original Floor Plans from the Dakota, River House, Olympic Tower and Other Great Buildings. by Andrew Alpern. The title is pretty out there, no? A really useful source for floorplans. (My apartment is in there—touch me.)

The Architect and the American Country House by Mark Alan Hewitt. OK - It covers a later period – 1890-1940. And it is a wonderful period of BIG bucks being spent on BIG houses. Glory days for residential architects (it was all about domestic staff). Lots of illustrations of beyond grand houses (and, by the way, in case there is any misconception, architects do not die rich. You look at Biltmore and think ChaChing but I’ll bet Mrs. Richard Morris Hunt barely got a new mink coat outta Mr. Hunt’s signing up George Vanderbilt as a client.)

Oops—never talk about money—a Rule.

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