The Porches – The Design Phase Heats Up

After comparing and contrasting virtually every baluster in two counties, our restoration blogger Carey Maloney and his partner Hermes Mallea of M (Group) have (beautiful!) drawings. If you ever wondered what designers do, and why it costs so much, check out this process: It may not be rocket science, but it’s close.

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The house, porchless (left) as it is now and (right) as it will be someday soon (they hope).

Well, the Field Trip phase is over (Too bad.. It was fun..) and the design phase for the exterior work has entered its final stage before all is turned over to the builder for pricing.

Now that I think about it, the Field Trip phase continues, in a way. We seem unable to drive by an old house—or shack—without Hermes piping up, “Can we stop? Can we stop?” for yet more photos of its details. Once, on another project, the Beverly Hills police intervened when we lingered too long documenting, if I remember correctly, a sorry house but with a great front door (I mean, we were in The Flats for crying out loud! On a public street!) Happily, the Rhinebeck constabulary hasn’t nailed us yet. But I digress…

As I’ve mentioned, we love the idea of both upper and lower sets of balusters. (Above, note the no-baluster portico roof in the photo at left, and the ones with balusters in the drawing at right.) Very swell. So there will be LOTS of these turned wood balusters—483 give or take. This huge number makes this element uber-important. A profile that is too simple or too bulbous will not have the visual impact that a crisper silhouette will give us. Bear in mind, these will be seen from many vintage points—dead-on, from below, and from the sides—and all at once. There is a lot of interplay to take into account. Think: Rhythm.

Our baluster design is a variation on a number of the local examples we saw. On paper we love it. That said, a full-sized sample will be made and inevitably it will get tweaked. Most of a baluster’s elements have human names—Belly, Neck, Beak, so our tweaking will be sort of like an exploratory visit to the plastic surgeon—carve off a bit of the Belly, make the Hip a bit fuller.

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At right you see Clermont’s back porch, added after 1870. These balusters are too thin for us, but we like the bold curve of the handrail.

Left, another neighbor— Belly too big for our taste and the height is too short to satisfy building codes.

Right, Montgomery Place—closer to our goal.

The new River facade staircase was the source of much discussion with The Owners. Stairs are complicated—the rise (total height of set) and the run (total length of set) obviously impact the design. We always seek to achieve “graceful” but you gotta make them work too—easy to walk up and down. (Fun fact: My stair man in NYC tells me that a difference in height between steps of ¼” results in a stumble factor. We recently completed a duplex with handsome existing iron stairs that required 1/32” layers added under the Oriental runner to correct for this tiny—and definitely trip-inducing—difference at the top step.)
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HM and I love the elegance of an upper run of stairs between the lower runs—so we pressed for the C shape instead of a straight stair. Plus the height made us nervous about straight—it seemed too long and too high—sort of like Harmonia Gardens in Hello Dolly. We think a C’s “got elegance” (and to quote Cornelius and Barnaby, “If you ain’t got elegance, you can never ever carry it off.”) So we sang and danced and got the C shape (note stairs at left on plan below—see? a backward C).
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OK—what follows comes under the heading TMI (Too Much Information) but… Keeping in mind that there is a fine line between too linear or too curvaceous, we’ve opted for a flat handrail that curves at the ends where it meets the newel posts (see detail, below).
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We also opted for a stringer, as opposed to exposed risers (in the drawing above the stringer is transparent; in life, of course, it will block the view of the steps from the sides), which allows the balusters to be evenly spaced without worrying where they land on each step. Sometime, carefully study a staircase (you can do it). There are multiple balusters and some steps may have two and some three. (My personal favorite is the McKim Mead & White house with three different styles of balusters on each step. Sort of a ragtime rhythm.) On ours, note how our evenly-spaced balusters would sit on the stairs without a stringer. Chaos! With a stringer, not a problem. Finally, look at the tops of the balusters—see how the height varies as each meets the rail? Aaargh…stairs!

HM’s best staircase to date—six floors floating. Magic.

As for our reading list, first I suggest The American Vignola by William R. Ware (The Norton Library). Way TMI but a great resource. Where else would I learn that our balustrade (if I understand Mr. Ware) has a Quirked Cyma Reversal…?

And The Emergency Committee’s (cool name) Great Georgian Houses of America Volume II includes Montgomery Place and Clermont. This book answered our questions regarding Clermont’s 3rd floor (added post 1870) and confirms bigger ain’t necessarily better. (Dover Press—we know my affinity for Dover).

As I was looking at the American shelves in our office library, I glommed onto Paul R. Williams, Architect (Rizzoli). Williams worked primarily in California in a variety of styles that departed from strict Classicism. Born in 1894, he was an anomaly—a very successful African-American architect designing houses in “restricted” neighborhoods (for Desi and Lucy, Zsa Zsa, Frank Sinatra), as well as clubs and hotels like Chasen’s and the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he would not be served. His 1937 Music Corporation of America headquarters (below) in Beverly Hills is soooo chic. An architect to be admired on multiple levels.

Paul R. Williams’ MCA building, Beverly Hills