IS IT OLD OR IS IT ANTIQUE?

A basic question confronting you, the new owner of an elderly building, is how best to rehabilitate or restore it within the limits of your available time and money. An analogy with furniture can be useful: Some pieces of furniture are "old," while others are "antique." These two words denote two opposite ways of regarding and dealing with the same object, and can apply to buildings as well as to furniture.

"Old" is pejorative. "Old" is outmoded, rundown, dilapidated, dirty, shabby, unfashionable, and ugly. "Old" is a disease to be cured by repair, modernization, clean-up-paint-up-fix-up, and renewal.

"Antique," on the other hand, bears positive connotations. Antique objects have patina; they are heirlooms, charming, precious, rare, beautiful, unique, and full of character. They are appreciated, cherished, conserved, invested in, and, occasionally, restored.

Pressing this analogy further, we can say that a few well-preserved masterpieces (silverware, chests of drawers, quilts, carpenters' tools, and buildings) are unequivocally antiques. Most other objects "of a certain age," however, either become antiques or remain merely old depending on how their owners treat them.

When viewed one way, a worn and scarred painted chest becomes a candidate for stripping, refinishing, new hardware, and all the other indignities that can be visited upon an object in the name of "fixing it up". In another context, it might be the object of attention at an antique show as an outstanding example of its type, and from yet another perspective, it may end up being knocked into firewood to take the chill off the parlor.

A curious result of dealing with our chest as though it were merely old is that doing so will severely compromise its chance of ever being seen as an antique: When an object receives new hardware or a new finish--to say nothing of being rendered into firewood--its antique value is drastically reducedÉ and it may be left useless as well.

Similar things happen to buildings. Few old structures can safely lay claim to being antiques in the same sense as a fine old chest of drawers which has been used and cared for lovingly over generations. Most buildings have all too often been subjected to the questionable virtues of modernization and the deliberate destruction of one character in favor of another, more recent one. Even so, some have survived almost unmodified or with the modifications made long ago and with great care, and can justifiably claim to be antiques.

One of the most satisfying old-building stories is the tale of the lucky soul who finds a wonderful and fearsomely neglected house, buys it for a pittance, carefully and knowledgeably restores it to its former glory, and lives there happily ever after. As a working outline for most of us, however, it's unreal.

To begin with, good antique buildings are a scarce commodity. If you do succeed in finding an old house, as likely as not someone else got there first and made some changes that have damaged or even destroyed its character. Even if you do fi;nd such a place, the owner frequently has an inflated idea of its value&emdash;and despite today's slow real estate market, that may be the price for which it sells.

Assuming you can overcome these obstacles, your structure will still need rehabilitation. Move carefully and think: a sudden, massive, infusion of money into an elderly building can be as devastating as a hurricane. There is a great urge to gallop ahead at top speed to make the place sparkle once again. If, in the midst of that process, the nature of the building is violated, along with its past, that's too bad, but, "Gee, you should have seen what a wreck it was before I started!"

I suggested earlier that the question of whether objects of less than first-order quality and importance are antiques depends above all on how they are treated. Too often, by substituting momentum for thought, we manage to treat potentially antique buildings as merely old. Taking the trouble to determine what is important about a structure before charging ahead with rehabilitation work is the critically important first step in treating it as an antique.

A building that has passed though many years carries a message about the past. In order to preserve that message, it requires treatment which is different from what would be afforded something merely "old." Research, contemplation, and possibly some expert help, will be needed to ascertain what the house represents, how it is significant, and how best to deal with it; and this information will all be needed before work begins. Taking time to think and probe is undoubtedly the most difficult part of working on an old building, because every instinct--to say nothing of high mortgage payments--urges getting the job done as fast as possible.

Treating an old building like an antique, however, requires more than just waiting until the necessary research is complete before starting rehabilitation: If you are serious about this approach, then you may need to consider adjusting your lifestyle to accommodate it. The idea should not be astonishing: Removing the partition that separates two principal rooms of an antique house in order to fit your desire for larger rooms can be as destructive to an antique building as cutting the feet off an eighteenth-century chest-on-chest to shorten it would be to a piece of furniture. In both cases the objects are being treated as merely "old," rather than as antiques whose forms, fabric, and finishes are all intrinsically valuable.

There are obviously limits to how few changes one can make and still have a usable building. Modern kitchens and bathrooms are essential, for instance, as are measures to meet building codes and to reduce heating fuel consumption. Careful thought can usually lead to good solutions: incorporating the "moderns" into secondary space or newly-built additions; inconspicuous heat-saving means that will not damage the building now or in the future; and so on. If you intend to treat an antique structure with respectful regard for its age and what it represents, then you must take care that you do not needlessly damage or destroy the very qualities that give it its value.

Just as our antique painted chest showed its age and wear, so will an antique building. Floors may not be flat, doorways may sag, walls may be out of plumb, plaster may not be smooth, and woodwork may be worn. If the place is merely old, then all of these characteristics become blemishes that must be corrected. If, on the other hand, the building is treated as an antique, then they are the stuff of which its character is made. Rehabilitation should then proceed with a light touch, avoiding the special grotesqueness common to wrinkle-free old ladies and "shiny new" antique structures. Practical considerations are involved as well: Levelling sagging fioors and truing out-of-plane walls may damage finishes and introduce new stresses and instabilities that can hasten the building's deterioration.

Antique buildings are not for everyone, any more than antique furniture is. It is irresponsible to risk damaging a fine old chair by tipping it onto its back legs while sitting on it; if you want Chippendale chairs and insist on tipping them back, you probably should acquire modern reproductions. They are products of our own time and will not represent as great a loss if damaged. Similarly, if you want a building with eighteenth-century trim plus flat floors, plumb walls, smooth plaster, crisp woodwork, and a floor plan perfectly suited to your needs, you would be wise to have a "reproduction" structure newly built for you.

Antiques take respect and care. They have been around long before you and I appeared on the scene, and if we aren't too hard on them, they will be around long after we've gone. That's the way it ought ought be, it seems to me, with chairs, with painted chests, and with buildings.

This article was originally published in slightly different form in The Old-House Journal, July 1981.