"... and was coated in five layers of paint. Gentle application of a scraper revealed a floral lattice wallpaper, which he left as is, creating a distressed cottage-core atmosphere."
From
"A 'Romantic Idealist' Renovates a Derelict House on an Artist’s Budget/A street artist had to depend on patrons to help him buy a 19th century house and had to depend on himself to restore it" (NYT)(free-access link, because it's a great story with great photos).
"This house is healing medicine to me,' he said of the 1897 three-story vernacular just steps from the Hudson River. 'It is my deliverance from the darkest of nights and it’s my phoenix rising.'"
(Gift link working now.)
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25 comments:
They call it a vernacular' house, and then they don't show any pictures of it. The pictures they do show, though: Wow. He did a beautiful job. I think he might regret all those exposed rafters come winter, though.
Wow! Fantastic. So many details. Clearly a labor of love and a 3D work of functional art.
Really great pictures. I’m wondering if he could make more money as a contractor/interior designer.
@ Aggie
I think they're 2nd story floor joists, not rafters.
He is allowed to have a gas range in the kitchen, and a wood-burnung stove in the bedroom. Artistic license.
I’m getting son great decorating ideas! House isn’t for me though—ceilings are way too low.
Peter Davington, “I’m honored to hear many say I should also branch out into interior design. Well if you twist my arm I’d love to get involved and help bring your home to something magical and on budget. There are so many homes that need our love and thoughtful attention so that we may leave this planet a little better than the way we found it.
The color green in my kitchen that people like is from farrow and ball. It’s called bancha green. Eggshell walls and gloss on cabinetry.”
That's a beautiful house; he's lucky so much original detailing was intact.
But the bedroom with the "distressed" atmosphere? No thank you. I'd rather not sleep beneath crumbling plaster.
Well, what a nice place. Glad he can afford appliances WAY nicer than mine on an artists budget.
Love the clawfoot bathtub.
"This house is healing medicine to me,' he said of the 1897 three-story vernacular just steps from the Hudson River. 'It is my deliverance from the darkest of nights and it’s my phoenix rising.'"
Okay, Sir Percy Shelley. That's nice. But the upstairs toilet is clogged and the heating that you waited all winter to go on is now going full blast. Hop to it, your lordship.
Didn't see any mention of lead paint mitigation as he was doing the gentle scraping. Did he and the Times ignore the issue or just the Times?
Mighty badass.
I love old houses, but they always come with problems. Bathrooms are tiny and plumbing and heating is usually a problem. Love that he went with an actual steam register. Moist heat is the best heat. Wonder if he had to get that tub re-enameled. And the reason it was so cheap is because nobody wants them. Hard to keep clean, hard to get in and out of. But they do look gorgeous.
Oh, and agree that leaving the wall paper in the spare bedroom is a mistake. The proper thing to do would be to take everything down to the brick and then plaster the walls, but leave a swath of the brick exposed to show what the original walls looked like.
https://www.houzz.com.au/magazine/masonry-magic-15-ways-to-trick-out-your-exposed-brick-wall-stsetivw-vs~48787627
I like it, but it's too bad he used modern bright white, which doesn't go well with strong colors.
What did he pay for the Thermador range?
I had to remove all the 11' plaster walls in my house, they were so badly cracked because the house wasn't renovated well in 1922 and then moved 20 feet in 1940. Every room was papered, including the ceilings, which were planks with burlap. One of the carpenters spent several days screwing every plank twice into every joist so they wouldn't ruin the new sheetrock.
I'll take it on faith he did all that in 2 years "mostly on his own labor". It is well done and creative for sure.
I love the Hudson River School and the house seems like a reminiscence of the era. The guest room would be the bad memories; I wouldn't be able to sleep there but I guess the artist is making the record complete. My favorite artist of the School is Frederick Church and this is a sky painting of his I like a lot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Edwin_Church#/media/File:Our_Banner_in_the_Sky_by_Frederic_Edwin_Church.jpg
Big deal. I'm a girl, and I've done Victorians and crumbling mid-Century Modern cinderblock without needing "sponsors." I can re-plaster lathe. It's easy to learn. Ordinary working people do this sort of thing every day. There's no way he did one fifth of that work.
I did a WWI German internment (yes, we interred them too, only without the whiny PBS specials, and there were lots of German and Japanese spies) house once in south Atlanta. The men were interred in the federal prison up the road, and the women and children were kept from starving by being permitted to sell poured-metal toys and pastries through the barbed-wire fence once a month. They subsisted on their gardens. The walls were insulated only with layers of newspaper and crude-stamped wallpaper stuck on with flour. The pine was so hard I broke lots of sawzall blades. The outhouse base was still in the yard.
Regardless of race, most people lived like this back then. Something to think about.
I've renovated over a dozen houses, from a 1917 Baltimore row house with the original asphalted fabric wiring insulation, lead paint and asbestos in the giant 1930s kitchen stove, to 20 year old Texas suburbia ranchers that just needed some love and a bit of paint. Oddly, nobody ever patronized my efforts. And one of those houses had a garage Opossum that did not want to relocate.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone refer to working with 19th century lath and plaster as “healing medicine.”
The patrons were probably called Mom, Dad, and Trust Fund.
I've been watching a YT channel where a guy is restoring what looks like a much older house in countryside France. No way has it stopped at the wallpaper.
"The pine was so hard"
I tried replacing my 1920s rusty, exposed siding nails with longer stainless nails. The studs were like stone, so half the nails bent, even in the old holes. Switched to galvanized and still had a few problems. What shocked me was that some of the "new" twenty year old roof timbers had hardened, too, I guess from the heat.
Georgia pine cut early in sap becomes rock over decades.
I don't believe anything in this article.
My current house, on 15 half flat acres in Forsyth County, Georgia, is for some reason a Canadian modular. I don't know how it got to north Georgia. It's gorgeous now. I spent the first two years with a Home Depot bucket outhouse (no neighbors), a sink off the porch, a cold-water shower strapped to a tree, and one room to cook, sleep, and live in. That useful degree in Metaphysical poetry. Underneath, there were the bones of hundreds of possums and one last magestic fight between a possum king and the bobcat who lived there. I washed possum bones from my hair every night. I was alive.
They died in each other's arms. I carefully extricated it and gave it to a forensic illustrator friend who specializes in animal remains near mass human slaughter sites and had worked at the Bone Farm. She says the woman who wrote those books (Bones, also a tv show) is a fraud.
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