Tag Archives: design

December 5, 2011

Scenes from the Tour

By daseger

Unseasonably warm weather and enticing houses created crowds in my neighborhood this past weekend, as the 32nd annual Christmas in Salem holiday house tour transpired.  I took a short walk along most of the tour route in the virtual footsteps of Boston (and Salem) architect William G. Rantoul (1867-1949), whose work was showcased on this year’s tour.

This Federal house was Rantoul’s residence from 1907 to 1939.  According to Bryant F. Tolles’ Architecture in Salem, he added the entry himself, based on the period design of that of the house two doors down.  The colonial and Federal houses of Salem must have been a constant source of inspiration for Rantoul, who worked primarily in the Colonial Revival style.  The Christmas in Salem Committee placed these red flags on sites associated with Rantoul.

Lines on either side of Chestnut Street.  Around the time of World War One, Rantoul made significant additions and alterations to the Phillips House (above), which is now owned by Historic New England.

This great gambrel-roofed house at the end of Chestnut Street appears to be Georgian but is in fact the newest house on the street, built in 1909 by Rantoul for philanthropist Caroline Emmerton.  It is an adaptation of the eighteenth-century Richard Derby House on Derby Street.

Walking, walking…the top house has nothing to do with Rantoul and was not on this year’s tour, but is great nonetheless and this particular shot shows how fall-like the weekend was.

Rantoul’s major institutional commission in Salem:  the Salem Athenaeum, built in 1907, this weekend and in a 1910 postcard.

A great triple house designed by Rantoul and built in 1918 after the great Salem Fire . The decorated entrance, and 1918 Christmas cards displayed on a 1918 mantle.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Home, Houses

November 7, 2011

Three Towers

By daseger

One last “global” past and then I’ll get back to the streets of Salem, which are much more quiet now that Halloween is over.  While in New York last weekend, I took a photograph of an amazing etching in my brother and brother-in-law’s apartment, an etching that they bought nearly ten years ago while we were all on vacation in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.  I was present at the “moment of purchase” and remember the event very clearly:  we pulled the image out of a folder in a small gallery in the center of the city and were immediately taken with it:  “El Mas Alla”, by the Mexican printmaker Nicolas De Jesus, was a striking image then and remains so now. (The photographs are not perfect because the flash reflected off the glass, but I think you can still grasp the urgency of the piece).

Bear in mind, when we first saw this hand-colored etching it was less than six months after September 11, so the image of the terrorists in the cockpit bearing down on the twin towers made us catch our collective breath, literally.  For me, the additional/traditional Day of the Dead imagery only intensifies its message by mixing past and present, always a powerful combination!  Nicolas De Jesus apparently specializes in this potent blend of current content and traditional motifs, as illustrated by another work on papel amates (bark paper):  Wake Up America.  More images of the artist’s work and a brief biographies are available here and here.

Ten years on, the Nicolas De Jesus etching in my brothers’ Brooklyn Heights apartment is all the more compelling because of its placement:  on a wall adjacent to a large casement window overlooking New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty, and the rising One World Trade Center at Ground Zero, pictured below on the evening of September 10, 2011 and last weekend.

6 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Culture

October 17, 2011

Best Bats

By daseger

Even though I don’t jump on the Halloween train here in Salem, I do decorate my house for the season.  I can’t help it; I am an habitual holiday decorator.  And I generally invite people over for Halloween night, not because I want to celebrate, but because I want them to hand out the bags of candy for the hours that it takes to appease the hordes of trick-or-treaters here in Salem while I hang out in the back.  So I like the house to look festive.  My fall decorating theme of the past few years—lots of owls everywhere—has become far too common so this year it’s all about bats.  Unlike most people, I don’t find bats even remotely scary or icky.  To me, they look cute and interesting and unique—a mammal that flies!  So I’m enjoying the various bats around the house; I may even keep them around until Christmas.

My decorating approach is both historically crafty  and acquisitive;  I look for historic images that I might be able do reproduce somehow—cards, garlands, decoupage–and I shop.  Since Etsy has been around I’ve done less and less crafting and more and more buying!  There are lots of digitized historic images of bats available, from the medieval bestiaries, early modern natural histories and nineteenth-century encyclopedias.  Here are some of my favorites, in chronological order.

Pierpont Morgan Library MSS 0081 (circa 1185) and 175 (circa 1500):  two hanging bats and a hybrid man (king?)-bat:

Seemingly very modern, but actually from the seventeenth century, is the Spanish artist Jusepe de Ribera’s Studies of Two Ears and a Bat from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Its motto:  Fulget Semper Virtus (Virtue Shines Forever).

But it’s in the next century that we get the best bats:  the bats of the Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-88.  Buffon’s pioneering and lavishly-illustrated (by French illustrator Jacques de Seve) 36-volume Natural History:  General and Particular (1749-88) contains illustrations of all sorts of bats, from long-eared to vampire (first named by Buffon), and as it was a reprinted frequently over the next century-and-a-half  it is a treasure trove for hunters of antique animal images.  Here are some of my favorite Buffon bats from the 1753-54 volumes of the Natural History, via the University of  Strasbourg:

A variety of bats from the 1799 edition of Buffon’s Natural History:


The Etsy seller antiqueprintstore has digitized images of bats from an 1831 edition of Buffon for sale; their postcard-sized prints can be used in a variety of ways.  I post them up on my parlor mirrors, along with the usual seasonal paraphernalia.

Tuesday Addendum:  I wanted to add this great 1919 Salem postcard, generously forwarded to me by the Salem native, author, collector, and researcher extraordinaire Nelson Dionne.  I love it!

11 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History, Home

October 7, 2011

Salem Staircases

By daseger

Staircases are one of the most interesting features of older homes as what could be a very utilitarian detail is often not.  Given its history, Salem has tons of really interesting stairways, in both private homes and public buildings, dating from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries.  This post contains a rather random selection of some of my favorites, but certainly not all.  I put in one shot of our staircase, although it’s really not all that impressive, as the original simple Federal-style railing was ripped out in the 1850s and replaced with a rather bulky (though solid mahogany) “improvement”.  I didn’t want to bother all-my-Salem-friends-with-nice-staircases (because they all do) but I did bother one, as I wanted to feature one of my very favorites:  look at this beautiful suspended spiral staircase unfold.

This is the amazing staircase of the Jabez Smith House, built around 1806 on upper Essex Street and now the home of my friends Dan (an architect), Betsy (an interior designer), and their two young daughters.  Besides this elegant entryway, this house has a living room that extends the width of the street, with fireplaces at each end, and you can see the rest of the first floor (along with 12 other decorated historic buildings) in early December when it is featured on Historic Salem’s 32nd Annual Christmas in Salem tour.

Below is another spiral staircase, in the Saltonstall-Saunders House on Chestnut Street.  The next succession of photographs were all taken by Mary Harrod Northend (1850-1926), the Salem-born photographer, author, and Colonial Revival aficionado, a colleague and contemporary of Wallace Nutting and Frank Cousins.  The first photograph is from her 1911 book Colonial Homes and their Furnishings and the rest are from Historic Homes of New England (1914).  After the Saltonstall staircase, there is a rather grainy photograph of the staircase in Samuel McIntire’s Cook-Oliver House, also built in the first decade of the nineteenth century, and the staircases of the seventeenth-century Pickering House and two eighteenth-century houses (left is an unidentified Norman Street house, right is the John Derby Mansion of Washington Street–neither survive).

You can see that the owners of the Cook-Oliver House have simply draped a hall runner on their stairs, which strikes me as a great example of “Yankee thrift”.  Another example, which I have seen on many second-floor Salem stairs, is provided by these upper stairs in another McIntire building, the Peirce-Nichols House (1782 and after 1801).  Painting a runner on the upper staircase to mimic an expensive carpet runner on the first is a neat trick, and as you can see below,  I did the same thing on my second-to-third-floor stairway and saved quite a bit of money in the process.

Peirce-Nichols Second-floor Stairway. Photograph courtesy of Jim Steinhart, 2011

Two last photographs of more of my favorite Salem staircases:  a HABS shot of the elegant central stairway in the Joshua Ward House (1784-88) from the Library of Congress, and the front hall of the Brookhouse Home for Aged Women, with an interesting lattice detail on its stairs.

6 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Houses, Salem

September 29, 2011

Elephant and Key

By daseger

I came across this receipt for the obsolete Asiatic National Bank of Salem (1824-about 1910) and was immediately enchanted:  an elephant holding a key, my two favorite images, together.

A great clipping, but what to do with it?  I thought I might try to transform  it into fabric via Spoonflower, but the fact that it’s a seal, featuring words and letters, makes it a bit too official/souvenir-looking for a fabric, I think.  Still, it’s always fun to play around with that site, so it took me a while to reach that conclusion.

I also found a check (for three cents!) and a banknote (for three dollars), from back in the day (in this case 1864) when currency could be issued by private banks.  As you can see the elephant, ever the symbol of the exotic east, is featured prominently (but no key).

From this bill, it is obvious that the bank’s office was in the East India Marine Hall, before it became the Peabody Museum (and the present-day Peabody Essex Museum).  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked by this building and failed to notice the “Asiatic Bank” inscription on the front.  A 1933 HABS photograph of the Marine Hall from the Library of Congress is below, as well as one of its facade, taken yesterday.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in History, Salem

September 27, 2011

The Return of the Dutch Chair

By daseger

The very first antique I bought was a Dutch marquetry chair from the 1820s.  It cost either $425 or $475; I can’t remember exactly, but I was a graduate student in my 20s and it was a lot of money.  If it had been in good condition it probably would have cost a lot more, but one of its legs had been broken and repaired and there were some punky spots here and there. I didn’t know about CONDITION yet, but it hardly mattered to me.  I loved the chair’s curved back and arms and thought it was the most beautiful piece of furniture I had ever seen.  For quite awhile, it played a major role in several living rooms, but gradually it got pushed out, and relegated first to the second floor and then to the third, both because it was rather frail and I kept buying more and more chairs–a major weakness of mine.

The summer before last, the chair was in such an insignificant space that I thought, why don’t I see if someone can make it strong again?  I certainly won’t miss it!  So I called a series of restorers and woodworkers, all of whom said no, too difficult to fix or not worth the effort.  Finally, one nice man said he would give it a shot.  I said, take it away and take your time, and off he went.  I promptly forgot all about my old chair until the middle of this past summer, more than a year after it left my sight.  Mr. Pelletier (Pelletier & Son Furniture Restoration, 52 Howard Street Extension, Salem MA) delivered it to my door, refitted with new internal frame, missing marquetry pieces replaced, and French-polished.


I was very excited to have my chair back but obviously it was time for upholstery.  So off I ran to Zimman’s for my fabric (the best decorating resource anywhere:  80 Market Street, Lynn, MA; zimmans.com).  There’s so much to see there I always get a bit lost, but I finally emerged with a dull gold silk damask fabric that I thought would complement, rather than contrast with, the chair’s woodwork.  A couple of days later, Steve the upholsterer (Up–Right Upholstery, 250 North Street, Danvers, MA; uprightupholstery.com) came to get the chair and it just returned (again).  It’s strong enough to be a living room chair now, but I prefer it in my bedroom, where it has pride of place.

5 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Home

September 14, 2011

Cat Scratch-free Couch

By daseger

Like everyone who has cats in their house, particularly cats who stay indoors, I face the constant threat of shredded upholstery.  I’ve learned to live with it, knowing that I brought my cats into my house and they do have to scratch something, and it is generally a manageable issue, with the strategic placement of scratching posts and double-sided tape.  But there is one couch that my two cats would just not leave alone:  an 1840s Empire sofa, covered in a fine cotton fabric that both they and I love.  I tried all sorts of defensive mechanisms, to no avail; they could always find a patch of fabric to dig their claws into.  So finally I called it a day and called the upholsterer.

The culprits, greeting me at the door.


Their prey.

Since it was only the sides and back of the couch that were clawed, my upholsterer and I came up with a good solution (so far) to this particular problem.  I purchased a very tightly-woven thicker cotton coordinating fabric, and Steve upholstered half of the couch.  I think it looks really cool, and except for a few attempts, the cats have been paws-off.

Keeping their distance.

Sniffing, but not clawing.

Close-up of the two fabrics.

Close, but no clawing.

Safe and sound, for now.


6 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Home, Salem

August 31, 2011

Street Art in Salem

By daseger

At the beginning of the Summer, four large metal sculptures were installed on the streets of downtown Salem, the first pieces of a “full public art program” to follow.  I wasn’t sure about these sculptures at first (both as works and in situ), but I’ve been watching people, especially children, interact with them for several months, and now I like their presence on the street.  The sculptures, by Massachusetts artist Rob Lorenson, will be on Essex and Washington streets until early November.

Unfortunately there is one sculpture downtown that will not be leaving the streets of Salem in November:  the Bewitched statue of Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha, which was inflicted on the city by the executives of TV Land (with the full cooperation of the city government) in 2005.  Not only is it a terrible piece of “art” (just look at the “cloud” pedestal! ) but it demeans Salem’s history and the prominence of its site, Town House Square, which has long been the city’s political and commercial center.

Town House Square in 1906.  The Samantha statue is located near the street opening at center left.

In stark contrast to the Samantha statue in terms of taste, historical relevance, and artistic merit is the Witch Trials Memorial installation adjacent to the Charter Street cemetery in downtown Salem, dedicated in August of 1992 by Elie Wiesel in a ceremony that marked the culmination of the year-long commemoration of the Trials’ tercentenary. Designed by artists Maggie Smith and James Cutler, the Memorial features a solemn courtyard enclosed by a stone wall incorporating 20 cantilevered steps, inscribed with the name and date of execution of each victim of 1692.  It is always a poignant place to visit, and was all the more so on an absolutely beautiful afternoon with the remnants of Irene strewn about.


2 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Salem

August 19, 2011

Urban Cottages

By daseger

Inspired by one of my favorite blogs, An Urban Cottage, the relative popularity of one of my posts, “Diminutive Dwellings”, as well as by the houses themselves, I’ve gathered some photographs of  some Salem cottages, most of which were built in the early and mid-nineteenth century.  One of the best things about living in a small city is the sheer variety of architectural styles, as well as the presence of buildings of very different sizes, sometimes even adjacent to one another.  Salem is renowned for its grand Federal mansions, but it certainly has its share of smaller-scaled houses, many of which are equally impressive, in an altogether different way.  In fact, it was difficult for me to narrow down my choices; I think I will need at least a part two, and maybe a three and four.  I tried to include structures from a variety of neighborhoods, but have left some notable ones out, at least for now.  It was also difficult to discern exactly what a “cottage” is, beyond just a small house, so basically I just chose small houses that I liked in a very arbitrary manner.

First up, some “mini mansards”.  There are lots of big Victorian houses with mansard roofs in Salem, particularly along Lafayette Street, but there are also several cottages with these roofs, located primarily outside the city center, in North and South Salem.  This first house is impressive down to the smallest detail, including its great flower boxes.

Two South Salem mansard cottages are below.  The first is a favorite of nearly everyone I know, for its prime harbor-front location (which you unfortunately can’t see from my photograph) , its cupola, and its overall cuteness. It was also featured in the early 90s Bette Midler-Sarah Jessica Parker film Hocus Pocus quite prominently (if I remember correctly).

In the historic center of Salem, there are lots of Georgian colonial cottages, most with gambrel roofs.  These little houses are colonial in style, but several of them were built well after the Revolution, as late as 1830; they must have looked quite antiquated when the Greek Revivals started popping up.  The houses below are all located on streets running off the Common and Derby Street.

This last group of cottages cannot be tied together by a common architectural style; they represent the variety I referenced above and are all just adorable.  There are Greek and Gothic Revival cottages in North Salem, a pair of shingled cottages on Derby, both former stores and connected by their owner by landscaping and paint, and an eighteenth-century cottage moved to its present location on Orne Square after the great fire of 1914.

1 Comment   |  tags: | posted in History, Houses, Salem

July 20, 2011

Diverse Door Knockers

By daseger

We’re doing some work on our front entrance, or I should say Dennis (the man who seems to be able to do anything) is doing some work on our front entrance.  Living in a double house means that if your neighbors paint anything that is immediately adjacent to your house, you must paint or be shabby by comparison!  As you can see, our entry differs from theirs anyway, as the guy who bought our half of the house in the 1860s was determined to “update” it in as many ways as possible, and so we have a much more Victorian entrance.  I like the window and portico feature, but as it juts out a bit there are always some weathering issues, which Dennis is addressing.

Looking at the front door focused my attention on its hardware.  We really need a new doorknob and I’ve never been happy with the door knocker, although it seems to be a match to the one next door.

Any opportunity to ditch daily responsibilities and dash up to Old House Parts in Kennebunk, Maine to look at bins of door knobs and knockers is welcome, but first I thought I’d look around for some inspiration.  So here’s my door knocker tour of Salem, beginning with the more whimsical door knocker creatures, familiar and a bit more exotic.

Some Arts-and-Crafts-looking ladies.  The red door opens the Chestnut Street house which formally belonged to the Salem artist Philip Little.  The same door knocker is clearly present (especially if you use the zoom feature) in a 1910 Frank Cousins photograph that I found in the great digital archive at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Some inanimate door knockers around town, including the more conventional (pineapple) and some unique (a harp?) examples.  I like the “knocking hand”, though the Old House Parts website informs me that this is a Colonial Revival knocker, not quite right for our house.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Home