Archaeological preservation, and preservation of landmarked buildings, are made simpler by the fact that many of the country’s most significant structures are unoccupied, have been considered of note for some time, and are usually managed by a nonprofit, or organization with a dedicated fundraising function.
This relationship means that the building is cared for and curated almost as an objet d’art, and the whole history of professional scholarship on conservation is brought to bear, with rafts of experts and distinguished academics weighing in on how to most sensitively treat the most remarkable and delicate buildings. Individual restoration projects can take several years, and are exhaustively documented.
This, in an ideal world, is how all significant buildings should be treated. However, money and time are no object only for a select few.
There are several routes to historic veneration. Of course there is simply the happy accident of a building being host to a notable historic event or personage. The building could also be so singular, so unique, and so significant to architectural and cultural history, that its role as a milestone confers admission to the club. There are also buildings as artifacts, which is the piece that concerns us the most here.
With the building as artifact, where a structure constitutes an eloquent essay on the lives and times of the past, originality is enormously important. New England is full of early houses, remarkable houses, but, perhaps somewhat unfairly, the houses that get all the glory are the most photogenic ones that have survived with originality intact. In addition, often overlooked are the small, badly treated farmhouses, the little country stores, and dissolving outbuildings.
The issue here is that the last 150 years, and particularly the last century, have seen such radical developments in the way we live, and their associated conveniences, that the centuries-long evolution of buildings could be tossed out on its ear, almost in its entirety.
I am not an Eric Sloane, raving blindly and piteously against the modern age and its supposed decadences. This is a fallacious behavior that one can find evidence of throughout history. Every generation believes it is the first to yearn for the past, in the same way that each generation believes it is the first to discover sex. We live in an extraordinary age of ease, and the upshot as far as historic buildings are concerned is that we can radically and cheaply alter at any moment any aspect of the buildings which reared us to suit the tastes of the moment. I do not subscribe to the idea that life was necessarily better in Ye Olde Good Olde Days; my argument is largely an aesthetic and emotional one. I'm not part of that school of cracker-barrel and pitchfork sentimentality, but I do believe that old, well tended houses and buildings are utterly serene, and beautiful. Even in the dyspeptic gingerbread of a Queen Anne roofline, one can find balance.
We can double glaze, install oil burners and forced hot air, air conditioning, linoleum and formica kitchens, fiberglass insulation, drywall, popcorn ceilings, vinyl siding, and asphalt roof shingles. We can install foam-core doors, plastic crown molding, aluminum storm windows, thin ‘hardwood floors’ and recessed lighting. We can carve a house into apartments and awkwardly nail in bathrooms with an almost amphibian-like level of enthusiasm.
A most troubling behavior in the treatment of an old house is the fondness for open living: building a sort of hangar-like space for milling around, cooking, eating, watching television, and having shouted conversations. Old rooms with a logical flow and intimacy are beaten together into a single huge chamber, leaving unpleasant proportions, ragged floors, and perhaps Fuseli-esque ranks of beams crudely ‘exposed,' smeared with Minwax Golden Oak stain, and varnished.
I understand that not all old houses are nice places to live – sometimes the rooms can seem warren-like, stifling, and dark. Not all old house designs are perfect, and many times the house has had a very hard life. In effect, some of the animals are more equal than others. In most cases, however, the framing and lines of the house are as clean and sturdy as they ever were. It can tell you many things, if you know where to look.
The service Arcadia Restorations offers is our most bespoke. Namely, it is to reverse the work of bad renovation euphemistically referred to by real estate agents as ‘restoration.’ Our craftsmen are capable of investigating and researching a building, both academically and forensically, to make the best conclusions as to its original layout and features. We will design, with you, a house with options available to its original makers, or containing the sort of sensitive, incremental improvements that may have been made in the intervening decades. In many cases, our best effort will still be something of an homage, albeit a sensitive and well-researched one.
We can make reproduction windows with restoration glass, and hang them in well-sealed openings that restore their proper function. We can make millwork by hand, and build joinery, cabinetry, and furniture that would likely be correct for the house. We can fulfill the dual role of carpenter and joiner, which were historically two separate fields. The small irregularites of handmade and hand-finished surfaces give a subtly natural, undulating, variegated look with a beauty which is as indisputable as it is serene. We can restore proportion, and scale.
We can remake a historic house to a state consistent with architectural history and vernacular style, rather than a state of multilation in the service of modish whims, or, to be more just, when straitened circumstances necessitated bottom-dollar improvements. A carefully restored house should allow you to live a moden life, but in a state as though you had always been able to care for the house, and to tend it well through small transitions over centuries, so that the house and its occupants evolved in concert, harmoniously.
An original, well-cared for home, sensitively adapted and lived in, feels like no place else. Every bad remodeling inflicted upon a good house takes it further and further from being considered worth saving. Eventually it will be a small matter to simply knock it down when it can stand no further face-lifting. What we seek to do is build an ancestral home, meaning a house that would have been comprehensible to each of one’s ancestors, going back to the house’s construction. This state of continuity, this state of being a touchstone, is what may someday earn a house its historic status. In two hundred years, our time now will be halfway back to the days of the early American Republic. Even a sensitive interpretation done in the 21st century may one day be a valuable artifact to those in future who would seek to understand the built environment of our earliest years. What Arcadia Restorations provides is a huge repository of knowledge and skill, the kind only found in old books, or handed down, and combats the damage done by insatiable hawkers of appliances, consumer goods, magazine subscriptions, upvote culture, and shoddy building materials.