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buttons-beads-lace reblogged your photo “I did the before picture but no after. Trust me, it looks different now. Original detail, 1835, probably last painted…”
#imagine wanting lil decorative fake columns on your house
#enough to (presumably?) carve them by hand
#what a great feeling that would be
(I just pasted your tags in here and it made them a bulleted list, isn’t that amazing, I was trying to make a bulleted list yesterday and could not figure it out for anything despite having been on this site for like seven years, and here it is. amazing. anyway)
I can do you one better. I typo’d in the original caption, the house was really built in 1825. And here’s the thing, it’s built in a sort of knockoff Neoclassical style that had been all the rage in the late 1700s, but had largely fallen out of fashion by the time the house was built– Wikipedia puts it as 1785-1815. (Yes, by the way, they all have hand-carved fake columns like this!) And you can tell, from various details of the house’s original layout and such, that it was built by people who knew how to build barns, not anyone who had ever studied any kind of architecture.
It’s very, very clearly a Big Fancy Farmhouse built by a guy who had grown up in kind of a shack and had always planned on building himself A Big Fancy Farmhouse and he finally had the wherewithal to do it, and he knew How Those Things Ought To Look and so he built it just– the way you Build Houses, right, the way they’re supposed to look. He had no idea about fashions or trends or anything, he just built it to look like the Big Fancy Farmhouses he’d grown up admiring.
Further charming details: the windows on the front are very ornate, with lots of those hand-carved fake column details, and the siding overlaps a lot. (There’s a very large central window with side-lights and fake columns on the front, which is actually often referred to as a Palladian Window, or there’s another more correct term for this specific one but I forget what it is– anyway, it’s an extravagance of glass, all in tiny panes, and tons of hand-carved details.) The siding on the sides matches, but the windows have less detailing. (The image I posted is of a side window detail.) And the back of the house has no windows whatsoever, with only a couple small completely-undecorated exceptions, and the siding is laid with almost no overlap– and what’s more, the front and sides of the house were painted bright yellow, as was In Fashion, but the back of the house was painted red with the same cheap iron oxide pigment as the barns.
It’s very, very much a Country Bumpkin house. There are other houses of similar style in this area but they’re all older; the house across the street was built in the same year, and is in a more updated style, and there’s a house next door that’s ten years newer, and also in a more updated style. But James was the first of the Morrisons to be able to build a big proper house and he clearly had some definite ideas about how a house ought to look– they way they were building them when he was a little boy.
(Bonus: Some of the hand-carved fake columns have been damaged or destroyed with age and we are going to have to figure out how to replace them. It may well be that my father has to hand-carve the missing pieces. Yes, for real. He’s already had to hand-chisel a few of the siding pieces, and cut elaborate shapes to replace parts of the window sills. So. It’s not a stretch.)
(Your picture was not posted)
buttons-beads-lace reblogged your photo “I did the before picture but no after. Trust me, it looks different now. Original detail, 1835, probably last painted…”
#imagine wanting lil decorative fake columns on your house
#enough to (presumably?) carve them by hand
#what a great feeling that would be
(I just pasted your tags in here and it made them a bulleted list, isn’t that amazing, I was trying to make a bulleted list yesterday and could not figure it out for anything despite having been on this site for like seven years, and here it is. amazing. anyway)
I can do you one better. I typo’d in the original caption, the house was really built in 1825. And here’s the thing, it’s built in a sort of knockoff Neoclassical style that had been all the rage in the late 1700s, but had largely fallen out of fashion by the time the house was built– Wikipedia puts it as 1785-1815. (Yes, by the way, they all have hand-carved fake columns like this!) And you can tell, from various details of the house’s original layout and such, that it was built by people who knew how to build barns, not anyone who had ever studied any kind of architecture.
It’s very, very clearly a Big Fancy Farmhouse built by a guy who had grown up in kind of a shack and had always planned on building himself A Big Fancy Farmhouse and he finally had the wherewithal to do it, and he knew How Those Things Ought To Look and so he built it just– the way you Build Houses, right, the way they’re supposed to look. He had no idea about fashions or trends or anything, he just built it to look like the Big Fancy Farmhouses he’d grown up admiring.
Further charming details: the windows on the front are very ornate, with lots of those hand-carved fake column details, and the siding overlaps a lot. (There’s a very large central window with side-lights and fake columns on the front, which is actually often referred to as a Palladian Window, or there’s another more correct term for this specific one but I forget what it is– anyway, it’s an extravagance of glass, all in tiny panes, and tons of hand-carved details.) The siding on the sides matches, but the windows have less detailing. (The image I posted is of a side window detail.) And the back of the house has no windows whatsoever, with only a couple small completely-undecorated exceptions, and the siding is laid with almost no overlap– and what’s more, the front and sides of the house were painted bright yellow, as was In Fashion, but the back of the house was painted red with the same cheap iron oxide pigment as the barns.
It’s very, very much a Country Bumpkin house. There are other houses of similar style in this area but they’re all older; the house across the street was built in the same year, and is in a more updated style, and there’s a house next door that’s ten years newer, and also in a more updated style. But James was the first of the Morrisons to be able to build a big proper house and he clearly had some definite ideas about how a house ought to look– they way they were building them when he was a little boy.
(Bonus: Some of the hand-carved fake columns have been damaged or destroyed with age and we are going to have to figure out how to replace them. It may well be that my father has to hand-carve the missing pieces. Yes, for real. He’s already had to hand-chisel a few of the siding pieces, and cut elaborate shapes to replace parts of the window sills. So. It’s not a stretch.)
(Your picture was not posted)
