Riverleigh

The finished rear elevation — a white clapboard gambrel with new cedar roof slopes, three brick chimneys and a run of French doors onto a raised deck

River Road · Essex, Connecticut

A 1746 gambrel that was meant to get a new bedroom over the kitchen, and ended up back at its frame.

The house has a name and a brass plaque to prove it, and the plaque starts at 1746. Eleven owners are engraved under that date, three of them the same family across fifty years.

What was drawn was modest: take the roof off the kitchen wing and put a bedroom up there under a new gambrel. What the wing turned out to be able to carry was less than that, so it came down instead — to the foundation — and went back up from the ground.

Once the crew was inside, the scope kept finding more of the house. It finished as a near-complete renovation, stripped back to the original post-and-beam frame and its vertical sheathing, with three new fireboxes, two new chimneys, a new deck along the back and an artist's studio off the garage.

The house was drawn by Anthony Vermandois, out of Sag Harbor. Five building permits and one certificate of occupancy, issued 3 January 2014.

The wing came down

The rebuilt wing going up in fresh clapboard with a new brick chimney, the original red house still standing alongside it — The new end wall up, chimney built, the old house still red behind it.

Adding a storey to an existing wing is a bet on what is underneath it. You are asking a foundation, a sill and a floor system that were built for one load to carry a second one, and you find out what you actually have only after the roof is off. Here the answer was that the wing could not do it, so the wing stopped being a renovation and became a new building on a new foundation — with the rest of the house still standing eight feet away, occupied by its own scaffolding and its own schedule.

Front elevation before and after — dark red clapboard with a mossy porch roof above, the rebuilt house below — Front, before and after.

Rear elevation before and after, showing the raised wing and the new deck — Rear, before and after.

II.

The frame is the finish

The living room — original hand-hewn timber beams overhead, grey painted fireplace surround and flanking built-in bookcases, white painted floor — Original beams above, painted floor below, everything between made on site.

Stripping a house to its frame is a decision you cannot walk back, and it sets every finish that follows: once the hewn beams are the ceiling, nothing can be hung, boxed or furred without arguing with them. The new framing was run in finish-grade fir on the same terms — sized and set to be looked at, not covered — and the ceilings between the joists are boarded rather than sheeted.

Three thousand square feet of floor was painted white over that. It is an old New England answer and an unforgiving one: paint on a wood floor shows every cup, every proud nail and every joint that was not right when it went down.

The living room before and after, from the same corner — Same corner, before and after.

The old kitchen mid-clearout — brown tile counters and backsplash, old cabinets, a porch with green painted floorboards beyond — The old kitchen, on the way out.

III.

A kitchen built in town

The finished kitchen — painted exposed joists and boarded ceiling, inset cabinetry, apron sink, a French range under a panelled hood, wide reclaimed floorboards — Joists exposed and painted, ceiling boarded between them.

The kitchen from the other end, showing the run of cabinetry and the reclaimed board floor — The other end of the same room.

The cabinetry was made locally rather than ordered, which is the only way it meets a ceiling like this one. A catalogue run assumes a flat plane above it and a plumb wall behind it, and gets neither in a house from 1746; every upper here dies into a painted joist that is where it is.

IV.

Under the new gambrel

The new master bedroom, just finished and empty — a panelled fireplace surround with a brick firebox, built-in shelves and cupboards either side, sloped gambrel ceiling, white painted floor — The room the whole job started as. Panelled surround, new firebox, built-ins either side.

The master bedroom from the opposite corner, showing the second slope of the gambrel ceiling and a bank of casements — The other slope, and the casements.

A gambrel gives a room two ceiling slopes and a flat between them, and the break lands wherever the roof geometry says it lands — which is rarely where a fireplace, a window head or a run of built-ins would like it to. Everything vertical in this room is set to that line. Four fireplace surrounds were made for the house in all, three of them over new fireboxes, and this is the one that came with a roof built around it.

Rooms that were already there

The study before work, stripped back — The study, before.

The finished study, panelled and shelved — And after, panelled out.

A second view of the finished study with its built-in shelving — Built-in shelving, made on site.

The entry before work — The entry, before.

The shelving, the cupboards, the panelling and the bookcases were all built on the job rather than delivered to it. In a house where no two walls agree, work made at the bench two feet from where it lands is the shorter route — and it is why the trim in these rooms follows the building instead of correcting it.

VI.

A studio off the garage

The back of the garage before the studio was added — The back of the garage, before.

The finished artist's studio — a shed-roofed addition in board-and-batten with French doors, double-hungs and a stove flue — Shed roof, board and batten, French doors and a stove flue.

Board and batten rather than clapboard, and a shed roof rather than a gable: an outbuilding that reads as an outbuilding. It went up in 2014, after the house was finished and occupied.

A worn brass plaque engraved in blackletter with the house name and a column of dates and owners beginning in 1746

Two hundred years on a brass plate

It came off the house during demolition and was photographed in the gutted kitchen, in somebody's hand. Blackletter, four screw holes, the finish gone at the corners.

The top line is the house's name. Under it, 1746, with no name against it. Then the owners in order — a Benjamin, an Ezra and a Henry of the same family carrying it from 1769 to 1817, and after that a new name every generation or two.

Somebody kept adding lines to it for two hundred years. That is the argument for restoring a house like this one, and it was sitting on a wall the whole time.

Recognition

Best Antique Home Restoration2014 HOBI Awards

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