THE HOUSE THAT NEVER WAS
A cautionary tale

To rehabilitate an old house into a character-full dwelling in which to live comfortably today, more is involved than just work on the building's fabric. Research and planning are needed to guide that work, determine what the house is, what about it is significant, what is its physical condition, how its owner intends to live in it, and more.

It's easy to make mistakes, but few errors have as devastating results as the combination of starting work before thinking, treating the house as though it were merely old instead of at least potentially an antique, and forgetting common sense. Occasionally they all come together in a truly awful result, The House That Never Was.

The most spectacular examples of this catastrophe happen when the urge to restore a house to its "original form" takes charge, and common sense takes a holiday.

Few old houses survive unaltered--generally, the older they are, the more extensively they have been changed. When an attempt is made to show each part of such an old house in its "original" form, the exterior must be altered, in the name of restoration, from a time-layered and more-or-less coherent entity into a crazy-quilt juxtaposition of fragments from different eras that could never have existed side-by-side at the same time. Hence the name, The House That Never Was. Let's see how one might come to pass:

Imagine a house that started out as a small cottage built in the late 1600s, with steeply-pitched roofs, small leaded-glass windows, and a large pilastered chimney:

Some time before the Revolutionary War, its owner enlarged and modernized it. At that time the style of the house was not particularly rare, nor did anyone consider it to be an antique; it was just old, inconvenient, and unfashionable when compared to the formal Palladian style that was then popular.

Consequently, its owner had no qualms about making major changes when he expanded it. He removed gables, relocated and enlarged windows, changed roof pitches, applied new decorative detail, and generally made the whole thing appear up-to-date. In 1759, after all, one updated the earlier part of a house when making a "modern" addition just as one typically does today:

Around the time of the Civil War, another owner modernized and enlarged the house. The classicism of the eighteenth century had by then become utterly outmoded in favor of a more ornate and picturesque esthetic, so this owner added a piazza across the front, constructed a new service wing, replaced the small-pane window sash with large sheets of glass, and changed and "fancied up" the trim. Around the turn of the century, still another owner rebuilt and modernized the porch. adding a fashionable octagonal gazebo at one corner.

By this point, the house had become a veritable time machine. Change laid over change produced a record of continuous use and adaptation spanning more than two centuries:

The house remained more or less in this form until a few years ago, when Mr. and Mrs. New Owner arrived on the scene. They were thrilled to have found such an old house, but were troubled by what they felt were the unfortunate changes that had been "inflicted" on it since it was built. The solution was obvious: restore the building's original appearance. Right away, the New Owners ran into a problem: What was that "original appearance" they sought?

Like most old buildings, the this house took its form as the result of continual change which, by adding new elements and removing old ones, had produced its present appearance. Restoring the house back to a tiny seventeenth-century cottage would leave no place to live (and would destroy some lovely eighteenth-century work in the process), so the New Owners decided to restore each part of the house to its original appearance.

And away they went, stripping off and discarding later accretions and exposing (and reconstructing) earlier ones: They removed Victorian woodwork from the parlor in order to reconstruct the Georgian woodwork they were sure had been there. They tore out pre-Revolutionary work in the oldest part of the house in order to reconstruct the great "walk-in" fireplace, and so on. Off came the piazza. Up went high seventeenth-century gables and a steep roof over the oldest part of the house. And so on.

When the New Owners had finished their restoration, the result was architectural anarchy. Inside and out, the house had been changed from a building richly layered with evidence of change and a sense of history to a collection of largely reconstructed architectural fragments. Although each part had been restored to its "original" appearance, the net result was an architectural and historical monstrosity.

A pedimented doorway of the 1750s found itself cheek-by-jowl with the tiny diamond-paned casement windows of almost a century earlier. Around the corner the seventeenth century collided with the Victorian service wing, whose large-paned window sash had been replaced with small-paned ones to match the reconstructed sash in the main block. At the housetop, steeply-peaked roofs with late medieval cross gables bumped into neoclassical dormers and cornices, while a massive pilastered seventeenth-century chimney stood beside a skinny nineteenth-century stove stack.

Although perhaps interesting as a collage of period architectural styles (assuming that the New Owners got their details right), the exterior of the house had ceased to exist in any coherent way.

It would have been better if the New Owners has constructed a new "old place" from scratch. It would have been no less unreal than The House That Never Was, and would have had the great virtue of not destroying another old building.

Such spectacular examples of The House That Never Was are mercifully rare. Budget and common sense usually have beneficial results. Lesser examples, though, abound in ordinary house rehabilitation. Often they stem from a failure to understand period style, and from treating early buildings as merely old, rather than antique.

At least part of the point to living in an old house is the pleasure of an environment full of the character and patina which only the passage of time can give--a tangible link to the past, and a reminder both of continuity and of change. How sad, then, to defeat by ignorance and foolishness exactly those characteristics for which one puts up with the inconveniences of living in an old house in the first place!

Ignorance, fortunately, is curable (although stupidity, with which it is often confused, however, does appear to be terminal). The cure always takes time, work, and sometimes help from experts, but it can be achieved.

Rather than taking it for granted that one should restore a building to its original appearance, or that a currently-popular treatment is appropriate for the interior of a certain style of building, ask questions. Study your own house, and other houses. Read everything you can get your hands on (bearing in mind that setting something in type does not necessarily remove the hogwash). Visit museums. Consult with experts. Learn as much as you possibly can. Then, leaven your knowledge with a hefty dose of common sense, and get to work!

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Copyright 1981-2008 Allen C. Hill