A Sanctioned Tour of the House I am Stalking

Naturally, after I posted pictures of the inside of the house over which I am obsessing, I got a call asking if I’d like to have a tour. “Tomorrow, at 10:00 a.m.” It was an offer I could not refuse, because if i said no, I might not get another chance to see the house.

My host was charming and informative, and was patient enough to allow me to peek into closets and open doors everywhere. The house is more than 11,000 square feet, and is based on a five-part Georgian design with a main section, two hyphens and two “smaller” sections, either of which would make a nice size house. But this house has an extra two-story wing added, which housed the kitchens and some other rooms on the first floor and servants’ rooms on the second.

There are still most, if not all of the original details, like moulding, hard-wood and marble floors, doors, etc. remaining in the house, as only one family lived it it. But it was most recently (and not even too recently) used as a show-house, and vestiges of that remain as well. Come along and I will show you the current interiors. If you missed the original ones, click here.

One of the most wonderful things about this house is that there is a fireplace in almost every room. Most of them are early 20th century designs as that’s the era of the house, but many have had the surrounds painted in some form.

There are great details throughout the house, including these windows on a swinging door,

this beautiful brass doorknob and escutcheon,

the bell and buzzer system – the chapel wasn’t original to the house,

and this huge built-in safe.

Anyone who has read this blog knows I am a huge fan of enfiladed doorways, regardless of the badly placed exit signs…

and infilled doorways.

As I mentioned, there are remnants of the showhouse including this room. The gold paint is probably radiator paint, and the walls above the chair-rail are actually wood-patterned contact paper!

More radiator paint (or maybe it’s tea paper), this time in silver, but the original details are still there. Check out the jib door on the left below.

The rooms are so classic in their design, apparently a hallmark of the architect, Pleasants Pennington.

You can get an idea of the scale of the house from these two images.

The center hallway is still beautiful.

There was a ton of storage in this house, including in one of the hyphens,

and this closet with drawers and cabinets, as well as a chain to open the skylight.

We had a long discussion about the fact that the house was cream or pale yellow for the first several decades if its existence. Looking at the brick, it seems like the house might have had a light covering of stucco that covered the brickwork. Interestingly, in the architect’s rendering of my friend’s house, it was also a pale yellow over the brick, but the images of the house from the time it was built show it as brick. My suspicion is that the stucco started loosening sometime after the house transferred in the late 40’s, and so it was removed entirely. But traces remain. And the green in the image below comes from the copper screens.

Thanks for coming along with me on my explorations of this amazing house. I am heading to see another of Pleasant Pennington’s local projects over the weekend. It’s only open to the public twice a year, so it’s a “don’t miss” occasion for me!

PS – I PROMISE this is the last post about this house.