June 15, 2008

The House in My Dreams

I was lucky enough to grow up in the same neighbourhood where my mother grew up, and where my grandmother and several sets of cousins lived. The area was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted,Jr. who took into account the shape of the land when he laid out the streets and pathways. Olmsted and his father are most well-known for the landscape design of Central Park in NYC. The houses in the area are mostly Queen Anne, English Tudor, Georgian and Shingle styles.

While I was at my mother's today, we looked through piles of old photos and I came up with some of the interior and exterior of St. John's, the house where I grew up. I am still looking for the detail shots.

This house is where my mother grew up, and which was recently sold and completely renovated. It had an old carriage house behind it, with room for seven cars. Mostly my mother and her siblings used it to have parties in.
This is the house where we lived when I was young, and where we had the original compost heap and the wonderful grape arbour. It was solid stone and stayed cool in the summers and warm in the winters. The front porch was a great place to sit and read.
We moved to this house when I was about ten. In this image, you can get a better idea of the width of the front porch and the detailing along the wide wall that surrounded it. The porch extended about twelve feet beyond the sides of the house and was about twelve feet deep. The east side of the porch was shady in the mornings, so we ate breakfast out there in good weather. The west side was shady in the afternoons, so that's where cocktail hour took place. It was also a great place for parties.
One Christmas, I made a huge Williamsburg-style decoration for over the door. I remember that we had a few warm days and the pineapple started dripping!

Two of the bathrooms had tiny hexagonal tiles with a Greek key trim around the edges. You can see that the house shifted a bit!We all hated the sinks in this house because they didn't have modern mixing taps. It was impossible to wash your hand without freezing or burning them, or filling the sink. It looks like there's a center tap, but it's the drain.The window seat on the landing was a great place to sit and read. The windows were originally like the three at the top, but my parents had them replaced to let in more light and so they could see out to the back. The center window has my mother's family's coat of arms in it. When we moved, we had that window redone and took that special piece and had it framed. I loved the fireplaces in this house. We used them a lot, especially at parties, of which there were many. This has matched granite stones, two carved stone heads and huge mahogany planks for the chimneybreast. Unfortunately, they were painted later on.

This is the library, always a quiet place in the house. There is an oak mantlepiece, again with two carved heads, and a scroll with the words "A clear fire, a clean hearth and the rigour of the game", a quote from Charles Lamb from Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist. This was also removed from the house.

This is the view looking down into the center hall from the landing. You can see the huge chandelier at the top if the image. Someone's friend was bragging about his kicking prowess and managed to hit the bottom tier of crystals. The living room is off to the right and the dining room to the left. I remember rolling back the rugs and everyone learning to shag!

The dining room was such a great room. We ate dinner there nearly every night. The bottom two-thirds of the walls were paneled with a plate-rail along the top. The paper was handprinted in China and the curtains matched it. There was another huge chandelier above the table. There were pocket doors that sometimes closed and weighed a TON! This and the other snowy picture above were from the blizzard in 1996. This is the lower section of our back yard, and you can see the door of the sunroom, which was filled with plants. The picture below is from the opposite angle, probably four or five months later. You can see the garage in the top left and the path leading to the sunroom at the bottom right.
Seeing all of these pictures just makes me realize even more how lucky I was to have been able to live in such an incredible house. As you see, it's truly a special place. Thank you for letting me share it with you.

31 comments:

  1. What a gift to share with us all. Your "growing up" home is beautiful and gracious....how wonderful for you, and what memories. I have culled from the heaps of photos, my mothers homes, grandmothers homes and even 3 from a great g'mas. I am having them copied for my 4 girls. Thank you for the fun. Ginny

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  2. Wow, you grew up in some truly fabulous homes!

    I grew up in a series of Silicon Valley track houses made from Styrofoam ... But I guess we both wound up in the same place -- as lovers of old homes full of character and charm!

    Thanks so much for sharing your childhood homes with us.

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  3. Thanks for sharing you childhood home. I am lucky in that my mother, who is 84years old, still lives in the home I grew up in. It's a treasure.

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  4. You are not going to believe this! F.L.Olmstead was my great great uncle. See....we are connected! Your family home is just so amazing. I love it!

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  5. Hello again from Canada! I thought you'd enjoy the post I did this morning about your childhood home...and I linked you! Love you blog!

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  6. Meg,

    So glad you shared more. I just love the wide porch of the home you moved to when you were ten. And that Greek key tile border!

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  7. I loved seeing your house pictures. It brought back many memories of sleeping out on my grandparents large front porch in the summer. You're lucky to have such great interior shots as well. Thanks for sharing them and the history of the neighborhood!

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  8. I love hearing stories about people's childhoods like this - we're both lucky to have had such great childhoods!!

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  9. Meg - a wonderful home and a wonderful tour. It must have been fun to go through those photos with your mom as well. I was stuck in DC for the blizzard! If only I'd known you then.

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  10. OMG Meg! What a fabulous heritage. How in the world did you get all of those phtos without people in them?! All my old photos have people. You are very lucky to have the photos to remember such beautiful places. They seem like they are from a wonderful movie.

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  11. Wow, what beautiful homes!! I only wish the ones I've grown up in had that much character. My ideal home would be the house from when you were ten, I just love the symmetry to the facade!!

    ~Kate

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  12. absolutely lovely, meg- just how i've always envisioned life on the east coast to be- a grand old house filled with family and memories. thanks for taking us on a visit!

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  13. These are so wonderful. What a treasure trove, Meg! I owe you an email...this week I promise!

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  14. Liberty... how interesting about your great great uncle. We grew up learning about the Olmsteds and their landscape architecture.

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  15. GMG... My dad was a photographer and was always snapping pix of things, especially the gardens, on which he worked so very hard. I did find one packet of photos for the tax assessor, showing everything that was wrong with the 100-year old house!

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  16. M21... it is a very typical east coast shingle style house. The yellow one where my grandmother lived is also shingle, although i think the new owners put siding on it! Horrors! I had taken pix of that house but lost them when my computer was stolen. whaaaaa!

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  17. Hi Meg! You are officially tagged. Yes, it's going around! Hope you have fun with it. Come visit me to get the rules/questions!

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  18. great pictures - such a fun house to grow up in - and those porches - I have the wicker swing from my grandmother's porch but no porch - so we had a giant hanging contraption constructed - still not the same as hanging from the rafters -

    on another subject...camp journals are coming tomorrow - the girls that went to my camp were mostly from Boston or Baltimore - or Ballmore, as the girls used to say -

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  19. WOW - amazing houses!! I'm drooling!

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  20. It looks like the perfect setting for an idyllic childhood.

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  21. Meg - I'm so thrilled you posted these. I'm in awe of your house! I grew up in a mid century modern abortion = and dreamed of a house like this. seriously - the dining room is drool worthy- I love the plates on the rim of the paneling. And the paper. That stair hall!!! what a wonderful house to get married in.

    You are so lucky to have grown up in such history and beauty!!! are those azaelas in the backyard???? to die for!

    Joni

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  22. Joni... how funny that you should mention a wedding in that house. We were just looking at pictures from my sister's wedding last night. It was 21 years ago. We took all of the furniture out of the living room and had a small jazz band there.

    Those are azaleas in the pictures. The property was loaded with them, mostly hot pink and white.

    The plates on the rail are Davenport platters that are from my mother's family.

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  23. This must be the wainscotting you were telling me about! Its beautiful. As is the entire home. Thanks for sharing the lovely pictures of where you grew up.

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  24. Hi,
    I recently moved to homeland in baltimore. whenever i go out for walks, i am always entranced by the beauty of the old houses in the homeland-guiford-roland park neighborhoods!!
    I am curious...are these old beauties in your post located in the guilford area?

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  25. How lucky are you?? My mom was very modern (ahead of her time) and I grew up in a long, low modern house with hot pink kitchen cabinets and dining room walls painted chartreuse (in the 50s-60s). Very cool in its own right, but I've gone in the opposite direction with my tastes.
    Thanks for sharing!
    -Lana

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  26. WOW meg - You lived in AMazing homes!! Thank you so much for sharing with us. It was a wonderful journey to see and What beautiful homes indeed. Definitely puts the places I grew up into shame :)

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  27. I just love your old home. What I like about the house (meaning while your family owned it!) is that not only did it have a history, it looked like it did too. Today, people don't appreciate this type of heritage. They just want to rip all of the old stuff out and make it look like a hotel!

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  28. How beautiful! I love the Greek key tiles! Thanks for sharing :)

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  29. I am Canadian but had the great pleasure of living in Baltimore with my family for a few years. We lived in Guilford and absolutely loved it. The homes were so beautiful and the parks and gardens in our neighbourhood were breathtaking in the springtime. I still miss it!!

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