The Barn House

by Ed Zotti

  At every hand one saw signs of stopgap repairs and renovations done on the cheap. The worst example was the third floor. Originally, we guessed, the attic had been unfinished, but in the early 1930s a fire had burned through the roof, and whoever rebuilt it decided to convert the attic to living space. The original attic apparently hadn’t had a lot of headroom, so the remodeler provided more by adding a long dormer along the front of the house, parallel to the street. Where the dormer intercepted the projecting bay, the remodeler had built the bay walls up higher, then topped them off with an awkward roof. To complete the job, the owner sawed off the eave running along the front of the house, which had been orphaned when the transept roof was raised.19

  The result looked completely stupid. A three-year-old with a crayon could have produced a more attractive design. But the third floor was also one of the reasons we’d bought the house.20 I worked at home; I needed an office. The bay windows in the attic offered beguiling views up and down the tree-lined street. A big maple stood in the front yard; though the leaves had long since fallen on the day we first saw it, the branches extended close to the windows. I guessed that having an office there would be like working in a tree house. But the job had been hopelessly botched—we’d have to reconstruct much of the front of the house, to say nothing of the rest of the building. Here was a home that had been built by naïfs and wrecked by knuckleheads. Restoring it wasn’t a job we could just turn over to a contractor. We’d need an architect.

  3

  Many people agonize over the choice of architects. Not us. I knew a number of architects through my work; we spoke with three. Stuart designed jewel-box renovations, photographs of which appeared in national magazines; his work was exquisite, but a kitchen alone could cost $60,000.21 Pete specialized in low-income housing; he did clever things with drywall and other inexpensive materials, but we were looking for something a little more pretentious. We settled on Howard. He was a big man; a mutual friend had described him as having “no physical fear,” an assessment that was hard to argue with—I’d once braced myself in the back seat of Howard’s car as he barreled at speed through a service station to dodge a traffic light. Such stunts commended Howard to me now. Manic bravery normally wasn’t a quality one looked for in architects, but with the Barn House it couldn’t hurt.

  Howard was a pretty fair architect, too, concentrating on projects in a traditional vein. His firm was housed in a stately old building downtown that I was surprised to learn had originally been an automobile showroom—auto showroom design has come down a jot since they built this palace. Now it was a fine arts building full of piano tuners and violin teachers, with high ceilings, grand staircases, and big windows. I found all this comforting, and presumably from Howard’s standpoint that was the idea. If one’s would-be clients discover their prospective architect’s atelier is in a strip mall next to a Dunkin’ Donuts, they start having second thoughts.

  Howard spent a morning inspecting the Barn House with Mary and me, pointing out features of interest. One of the first he noticed as soon as we walked in the door. The floor in the front hall was finished in a fine-grained wood of a rich red color that we didn’t recognize. Howard informed us it was heart pine, cut from the heartwood of virgin timber.

  I’d never heard of heart pine before, and am not entirely certain I’ve got things straight now, but here’s the story as best I can piece it together: Heart pine came from a tall, straight species called longleaf pine, which grew in a vast continuous band along the southeastern U.S. coast. Longleaf pine was slow-growing under the best of circumstances, but in the virgin forest longleaf saplings grew slower still due to competition for resources beneath the dense tree cover—I’ve heard of a tree three hundred years old that was less than a foot thick. As a result, annual tree rings and thus the grain were close-spaced and the wood was, for pine, unusually heavy—a board weighed as much as oak, and served equally well as flooring. By the early twentieth century the original stand of longleaf pine, some seventy million acres, had almost all been cut down. If you want heart pine now—it does make a handsome floor—you have to deal with a salvager, who ransacks old buildings destined for the wreckers or sends divers to the bottoms of rivers or lakes looking for logs sunk during nineteenth-century lumbering operations. Salvaged heart pine costs two to three times the price of new hardwood, which itself isn’t cheap.22

  I was fascinated to find such stuff in my house. It was like discovering the original owners had dined on buffalo tongue or hunted passenger pigeons. There was only one problem. Someone had sawn two large rectangular holes in the heart pine floor to install heating grates, which had long since been removed. One hole had been patched with maple, the other with construction pine. Neither came anywhere close to matching the original. There was surely a way to repair the holes less conspicuously; we just needed to figure out what it was.

  Howard found another noteworthy item in the basement, where radiator pipes hung from the ceiling. They were wrapped in insulating material that in cross section looked like corrugated cardboard.

  “Asbestos,” he informed us. We’d need to hire a special contractor to haul it out, in all likelihood at exorbitant expense.

  That was pretty much how the whole tour went—one happy discovery to two or three dismaying ones. Howard was more circumspect than others to whom we’d shown the house, many of whom had stared with their jaws slack. But the thought undoubtedly crossed his mind: Thank God this isn’t mine.

  Afterward we sat down for coffee on the red stools in the diner down the street. The day was cold and gray. Howard was uncharacteristically quiet. “The house has good bones,” he said finally. He was referring to the method used to construct it, known as balloon framing. Balloon framing is commonly understood now to mean any kind of lightweight stick framing, but in fact it was a particular type of wood construction in which the exterior structural members rose the height of the building. When the joists and rafters were added you had a sort of cartoon outline of a house—a balloon, I suppose—to which everything else was then appended. In the case of the Barn House, the exterior studs were two-by-sixes twenty-seven feet tall, while the floor joists were massive two-by-tens twenty-five feet long. The enormous boards were another product of the virgin forest, unobtainable now except through special order. The house was a relic of a departed era.

  There was another long pause. “I bet we can save the light-bulbs,” I said, thinking this funny.

  A few days later Mary and I sat down with Howard in his office. He introduced one of his firm’s associates, a young architect named Charlie, who was going to sit in.

  Howard had taken some pictures of the Barn House and spread them on the table. We talked about what to do with the front of the house. I attempted to explain what I wanted.

  “I’m seeing kind of a dormer thing on the left side here, and I think this bay over here wants to be a turret thing,” I said. It wasn’t my most eloquent moment. Howard and Charlie nodded. Charlie had said almost nothing the entire time. We shook hands and left.

  A few days later Mary called me. “I just got a fax from the architects,” she said. “Let me send it to you.” The thin sheet emerged from the fax machine a few minutes later. It was a perspective drawing of the reconstructed Barn House, done in pen and ink. The original roofline (or what I could easily believe had been the original roofline) had been restored. A small dormer window overlooked the street on one side; on the other the projecting bay terminated in a graceful turret. It was precisely what I’d envisioned and what I’d ineptly tried to convey at our meeting with the architects. Charlie had designed it. He’d gotten it right on the first try.23

  Thus did we commence the process of design. It was surprisingly pleasant. Charlie, whom Howard had assigned to handle the brunt of the design work, was something of an anomaly—an architect without affectation or even much geekiness. Not all architects wear capes, porkpie hats, or bow ties, or sport glasses suggestive of nineteenth-century bookkeepers, or draw
with broad-nibbed fountain pens of exotic manufacture using sepia ink, but you find these things among architects a good deal more than you do among the cashiers at Target. Charlie had none of them. He was one of those people who’d resolved to rise in his profession on the basis of genius alone. You may say I exaggerate his talents. It’s true our project afforded few opportunities for the bravura displays by which architectural achievement nowadays is often judged—which is to say we didn’t propose to heave up spectacular confections made of stainless steel, or whitewashed tubular monuments suggestive of ships stranded on mountain-tops, or any other such heroic structure. The Barn House was an old frame house to start with, and assuming Charlie and Howard didn’t radically exceed their instructions, that was what it was going to be when it got done. So I won’t claim Charlie for the immortals.

  But make no mistake—he had the gift. He had a wonderfully fluid drawing hand, with a hint of a tremor in it, somewhat reminiscent of the smoke in the voice of the better class of jazz singer. To see Charlie render a wiring schematic—and I know, because I was the author of the scribbled original—was to see a grocery list transformed into art, all done without apparent effort, like an early Michael Jordan layup.

  I say without shame that I made Charlie’s life miserable over the ensuing several months. I didn’t do so intentionally, but luck had delivered an extraordinary instrument into my hands, and I meant to make the most of it. I wasn’t the easiest client. I had friends who were unfamiliar with bearing walls and soil stacks and other essential structural notions, and who were chagrined when their ideas for remodeling were greeted with stifled laughter. I didn’t have that problem, but I had, shall we say, certain directions in which I wished to go. We advanced by a dialectical process. Charlie would submit a floor plan, which might for example show the master bedroom suite at the rear of the second floor. I would peremptorily decide that this approach was unsound and demand that the master suite be put at the front, where it had been in Mrs. Carr’s day. I would redraw the plan in my amateurish way on onionskin tracing paper and send it to Charlie. Charlie would gamely do the whole thing over and send me new drawings. Studying the result, I would decide Charlie had been right the first time—there wasn’t enough room in the front of the house for a master suite of the proper hauteur. It doesn’t sound like the most productive system, and I doubt it would have worked with Frank Lloyd Wright. But Charlie and I got on well enough—partly, it must be said, because of Charlie’s inexhaustible amiability, but also because he was a member of the Brotherhood of the Right Way.

  EXISTING BARN HOUSE

  RECONSTRUCTED BARN HOUSE

  The Brotherhood of the Right Way didn’t hand out membership cards or hold meetings, but it was real just the same. Its adherents shared a simple belief: There was a right way to do everything, and one’s task in life was merely to determine what the right way was, and then do it. That’s not to say there necessarily was a single right way, although the more rigidly inclined members of the brotherhood might sometimes act as though they thought so. The truth was that the right way was a compromise between what you would do if you had unlimited time and money and what you could accomplish given that you didn’t. Naturally this involved an element of judgment, and two exponents of the right way thus might differ from time to time on matters of detail. Nonetheless, all parties subscribed to the belief that there was a right way, or at any rate some finite number of right ways. In this they stood in contrast to the general run of humanity, which had no concept whatsoever.

  Take the matter of home design. It seemed to me a basic rule of architecture that the inside of a house ought to bear some relation to the outside, but in my observation this principle was routinely flouted. The more common practice seemingly was to have the exterior and interior of the house drawn up by separate designers who never talked to each other and gave no indication of living on the same planet. Some joint House-Senate compromise committee would then take the two plans and attempt to cram one into the other—often, to my eye, with suboptimal results.

  There’s a woman I know well—it’s fair to say she’s like a sister to me.24 She and her husband had added a two-story wing to their suburban home with a pair of handsome dormers facing the street. Inside was a master bedroom suite of sybaritic luxury, with an entertainment center, spotlit whirlpool bath, and so on. I was impressed, but while nosing about with that blithe disregard of privacy one can risk only with siblings, I realized that the bedroom gave no sign of the dormers. Opening some doors, I found an odd-shaped collection of tiny rooms concealed behind a wall—the dormers, pressed into service as closets. No offense to my sister, but this made no sense. The dormers had been built at considerable expense and equipped with windows. But the windows didn’t provide natural illumination to the bedroom, where it might have served some purpose, but rather to the closets, where it didn’t—if anything, the sunlight would fade the clothes. A small thing, you may say. But to me it was cheating.

  Similarly, a home down the street from the Barn House had a fetching arrangement of overlapping gables and eyebrow windows and such that I felt certain must betoken an equally dramatic and ingenious interior. But when I had an opportunity to tour the house I found nothing of the kind. The volume enclosed by the overlapping gables was concealed by a ceiling—it was all dead space, though accessible by a door, revealing, as I recall, air-conditioning ducts. I was disappointed. One expected a certain amount of show in architecture, but to me this bordered on . . . eh, fraud is too strong a word. But it reminded me of the false fronts in old western boomtowns. In such matters Charlie and I were in entire agreement. We didn’t hold rigid views about form following function, but we felt they both ought to be headed in the same general direction.

  Our task was simplified by the fact that the Barn House had been well designed to start with. The front hall and the handsome staircase, for example—we’d merely have to restore them. How, I had no idea, but that was a detail for later. The parlor and dining room likewise were nicely proportioned, wanting only rebuilding. Even the inept effort to install a beam in the back of the house had simplified the problem of how to remodel a cramped Victorian kitchen in two useful respects: First, the beam builder had created a large space in which it was easy to imagine installing a modern kitchen; and second, he’d made hash out of everything that one might otherwise have felt obliged to save. Cabinets, some throw rugs, a couple I-beams—bingo, we’d be done.

  Simultaneously with the process of design I prepared a written description of the project. I felt that if I carefully defined what I wanted done, and broke it down into manageable tasks in a methodical way, I would have, first of all, a basis on which to obtain well-thought-out bids from contractors (which in general proved to be the case, although there were surprises even so), and, second, the project would seem less formidable. I can’t say the latter aim was successful. On the contrary, I scared the daylights out of myself. I’d gone through the house with a legal pad, noting the work that needed to be done in each room, then organized the work by trades, since that was how contractors priced jobs. The result was a “scope of work,” with sections for concrete and foundation work, drywall, rough carpentry (subdivided by section of the house), flooring, tile, and so on—nineteen sections in all. The scope of work ran to eleven single-spaced pages with more than a hundred items, not counting options. You may ask: Aren’t we overdoing it a little here? I don’t deny there were eccentric aspects to the program. However, if your idea of planning is drawings on napkins, I’m happy to compare results.

  Adherence to the right way was largely its own reward, but occasionally it paid off in practical ways. One was in connection with our application for a historic preservation tax break. Owing to the Barn House’s location in a historic district, we were eligible for a state program that would freeze our property assessment for an impressive number of years if we restored the house to certain standards. What made matters tricky was that we were planning major alterations to the appea
rance of the house, and we were unsure whether the state preservation agency would approve. To assist in the process we hired a consultant named Vicki. She wasn’t altogether reassuring, telling us of one application that had been rejected because the owner had proposed to install windows with muntins—thin wooden strips separating the panes—rather than the plain sashes originally employed. That didn’t bode well for us. We were planning to tear off much of the front of the house, including the porch, the roof, the siding, and the windows, and rebuild them as Charlie had suggested, which certainly looked better and conceivably (in my opinion, probably) reproduced the original appearance of the house. But we had no proof, no old photos, no 1891 blueprints. I asked Vicki whether she thought our proposal would fly. Worth a try, she offered cheerfully. She suggested sending Charlie’s scheme down to Springfield for an initial review.

  A week or two later I got a call from Vicki. The state had granted preliminary approval of our project, based solely on the rendering of Charlie’s plans. We would need to submit a detailed application in which I would have to justify the changes, but that was a formality. Perhaps the state’s examiners, seeing the before and after (Vicki had taken care to include a photo of the house as it then stood), thought: Anything will be an improvement. But truthfully I don’t think so. I’m convinced they took one look and said: This is the right way.