Definitively Deco: For more than 30 years, architect Thomas Thixton has been steward to one of America’s earliest examples of this ultra-Modern house style.

New Life for an Art Deco Town House: Cut up into apartments and falling into disrepair, an Art Deco town house reclaims its Jazz Age grandeur, thanks to the tireless efforts of one Chicago couple.

An Art Moderne Restoration: An Art Moderne house is usually the oddball in the neighborhood, and that’s true of this one in Alexandria, Virginia. But one couple knew just how cool it could be.

New This Week

5 Flowers For Your Historic Garden: Excellent as garden specimens and for cut flowers, these hydrangeas provide months of colorful bloom in historic gardens.

Saving a Dallas Foursquare: When a Dallas couple decided to revive the decrepit old house across the street, they ended up with a new place to call home.

Early Colonial Revival Architecture: The history of the “Old Colonies Style” of the 20th century.

Products & Services Directory

Pair of Warren McArthur armchairs, accepting offers
From 1stdibs.com

Originally trained in architecture and engineering, Warren McArthur began designing sleek aluminum furniture in the 1930′s. Before then, the handmade look was equated with dependability, but industrial growth and its association with scientific progress made streamlined furniture like McArthur’s increasingly popular. See similar Warren McArthur designs featured in this Art Moderne restoration. 1stdibs.com is an offer-oriented site, so if you’re too late for the armchairs, check out this list for more available Warren McArthur furniture.

View all 20th-Century Furniture in the Products & Services Directory.

Bookstore

Check out the Old-House bookstore for more great deals!

The restored bathroom in an 1894 house boasts a complex mosaic floor that resembles a richly detailed rug. (Photo: Bo Sullivan)

Unfortunately, we’ve all seen them—restored bathrooms that almost got the details right. Often they boast spot-on period fixtures, faucets, lights, and medicine cabinets, but are accompanied by a floor that looks as though it belongs in a 1950s science fiction movie—or worse yet, in the summer palace of an Italian baron.

Don’t let flooring selections derail your restoration project. Take a page from history’s rich offerings of tile designs to find a perfect, and appropriate, match-up for your bathroom, no matter how understated or complex your home’s architecture.

Tracing Tile

Ceramic tiles have existed for thousands of years—in fact, archaeologists have unearthed numerous mosaic floors beneath the ashes at Pompeii. But owing to production methods that were lost or forgotten over time, ceramic floor tiles didn’t become prevalent in the United States until the Victorian era.

Their popularity began in England, thanks to the Gothic Revival movement, which reintroduced medieval encaustic tiles—individual tiles bearing an inlaid pattern in a contrasting color, created by the new dust-pressed method—to a receptive public. As with many home fashions dating to this time, the tiles were brought to an American audience largely through Andrew Jackson Downing’s 1850 book The Architecture of Country Houses.

An installation of geometric tiles in a restored Victorian-era bath. (Photo: Courtesy of Tile Source)

Downing recommended entry floors tiled in marble or pottery for their durability, moderate cost, and “good effect.” His book makes direct reference to encaustic tiles—which at the time would have come from England in a range of browns inlaid with blue and beige tones (and would have been expensive imports reserved for the wealthiest homeowners); examples of such early installations can still be seen on the front stoops of many upscale high Victorian homes in California. (Another tile of the era, geometric, created intricate patterns from solid individual tiles laid in contrasting colors and shapes.)

America’s tile selections would soon expand, largely thanks to the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. The Philadelphia Exposition featured many exhibits of sanitary ware and decorative European floor tiles—including displays of encaustics by Herbert Minton, one of the architects of the Gothic Revival—and the buzz around them convinced their manufacturers there was a marketplace for such products in the U.S.

The companies soon established satellite offices, and their presence spurred on a domestic tile industry. The Pittsburgh Encaustic Tile Company is considered the first successful American company to manufacture ceramic tile commercially in the U.S., beginning in 1876, and by 1894 dozens of companies had joined the fray. Their early offerings dovetailed nicely with late Victorian-era discoveries on germ theory that would propel a desire for ultra-sanitary surfaces in kitchens and bathrooms, which made tile an ideal flooring medium.

Early mosaic floors coule be all white or feature a subtle, random pattern of dots or flowers. (Photo: Jason King)

New Offerings

In this fresh, germ-sensitive frontier, all-white tiles became preferred for bathroom floors because they were considered the best for spotting—and thus eliminating—dirt and microbes, and keeping a home’s inhabitants healthy. It didn’t take long, however, for improvements in the world of tile—new machinery that made manufacturing faster and easier, plus innovations in the tile-setting process—to usher in more creative decorative installations.

Pre-mounted sheets of 1″ ceramic mosaic tiles (in a range of geometric shapes like honeycomb, pennyround, and square) made intricate designs less time-consuming to achieve. For example, by replacing a few individual mosaics with tiles in a contrasting color, a basic pre-sheeted white 1″ hex tile floor could readily be accented with rosette flowers or a simple solid border.

Since these uncomplicated designs were relatively easy to create, they became as common as all-white sanitary bathrooms in houses of every architectural style beginning around 1900, shortly after bathrooms started appearing in private homes. Soon, though, homeowners who could afford the extra cost—typically those with more architecturally elaborate buildings—were selecting mosaic floors in more intricate designs. Such patterns could include a field of graduated geometric shapes—like diamonds, pinwheels, and nautilus shells—that were decorated with flowers, starbursts, and more. To add even more interest, these decorative fields were surrounded by a solid framework of border tiles bearing yet another pattern—Greek keys, for example, or intricate vines and leaves, or layers of solid borders reminiscent of an area rug. Thus the finished floor became, in essence, a rich, multi-layered tapestry of mosaic tiles.

A mosaic floor uses a simple order to frame a field highlighted with dots. (Photo: Courtesy of Northwest Classic Homes)

The evolution of such nuanced, intricate designs can be traced to England’s Gothic Revival tile creations. Peruse late 19th- and early 20th-century tile catalogs side-by-side, and you’ll see many similarities between encaustic and geometric tile installations and the mosaic ones that followed.

“Encaustic tiles were often used as featured centerpieces within a matrix of colored geometrics,” says Riley Doty of the Tile Heritage Foundation. “Color patterns were frequently highlighted by complex transitions between the use of a diagonal orientation and that of a square grid. A distinct tile border usually framed the ensemble.”

Practical Applications

Finding the tiles and patterns to suit your bath depends largely upon your home’s architecture. If your house is classic and clean-lined (say, Arts & Crafts or Colonial Revival), you can’t go wrong with a basic hex mosaic interspersed with dots or small flowers, and framed by a simple border. Such tiles are a good choice for all houses, actually, because they were in vogue shortly after the earliest bathrooms arrived indoors.

A modern floor's geometric tile-inspired installation of contrastic mosaics. (Photo: Courtesy of Kohler)

If your home is a high Victorian, geometric or encaustic tiles (or a combination of the two) also could work. While they wouldn’t have appeared in many original bathrooms, their popularity during the Victorian era, and their roots in medieval England, make them an interesting historically based choice for homeowners seeking creative flooring options. They also could suit homes in English-derived architectural styles, from Gothic Revival to Tudor.

As with all house projects, look to your building’s history for clues. The grander the home, the easier it can carry off a more elaborate design. Whatever tile and pattern you ultimately choose, rest assured that if it’s rooted in history, it will suit your house better than any of those contemporary offerings that look promising in the store, but are a letdown after installation.

House in Maine, ca. 1915: Its seacoast location, sprawling mass, and dark shingles connect it to the Shingle Style of earlier decades. But this house is more formally Colonial Revival with its prominent columns and balustrades.

The first waves of America’s most enduring architectural obsession . . . As the Victorian era drew to a close, nostalgic Americans looked to the architecture of the original Colonies for inspiration. Vernacular traditions (chiefly English, but also Dutch and German) were thrown into the mix, and everywhere the decorative vocabulary was that of 18th-century classicism.

The English Colonial Revival, which resulted in a national architectural vocabulary, was a movement with roots in Victorian-era Boston and Philadelphia. The “revival” encompassed every sort of replica and free adaptation of styles from the colonial, Federal, and Greek Revival periods (i.e., ca. 1670–1845). Colonial Revival houses were designed in a cluster of nostalgic sub-styles. Early on, Palladian windows, multi-light sash, broken pediments, and classical columns decorated large houses that retained Victorian-era massing with verandahs.

The rekindling of public interest in things Colonial dates to the 1876 Centennial, which opened the floodgates of patriotic sentiment and, among other things, focused attention on the rapid disappearance of original Colonial buildings. After that, architect Charles McKim and colleagues launched their seminal study tour of the old houses of New England. Their earnest photographing and sketching resulted in a “modern colonial style” of building: a studied vernacular of stained shingle walls, steep roofs, and classical ornament borrowed from Georgian buildings. (Since the 1950s, many of these houses have been labeled as Shingle Style.)

Colonial Revival Vocabulary

Motifs used in pure, simplified, or mixed-up form include pedimented porticoes, columns, dentil mouldings, a modified Federal entry door with sidelights, and Palladian windows. This 1895 house is by Stanford White.

These new houses were not replicas, nor were they intended to be. They were often larger than the originals, not often symmetrical. Greek columns, Roman pilasters, and Palladian windows were used to great effect in 1900, as they were during the Georgian and Federal periods [in America, the 18th century to about 1840]. Other details of real Colonial houses came back into vogue as well, including multi-light window sash, heavy shutters, hipped roofs, fanlights, Adamesque mantels, and graceful staircases with turned balusters. The center hall plan returned. The traditions revived were mostly English, of course, but the Colonial Revival also absorbed Dutch and German ones.

FREE CLASSIC: The huge McFaddin–Ward House in Beaumont, Texas, is an especially memorable example of the bold “revival” houses built after the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Designed by Beaux Arts architect Conrad Mauer in 1906 in a kind of fictionalized Southern Colonial style, the house is, according to Richard Guy Wilson, “one of the Deep South’s most prominent examples of columnitus giganticus.”

This 19th-century period encompasses the Shingle Style houses that were loosely based on New England vernacular forms. There was no attempt to be archaeologically correct; ornament from the Georgian and Federal periods (and even the Greek Revival) might coexist on the same asymmetrical house. Historian John Burrows has suggested the name Old Colonies Style for the nostalgic houses of the early revival, and particularly for their interiors, which often mixed iconographic “colonial” items such as a Windsor chair or spinning wheel with English art-movement wallpaper by William Morris and the odd piece of Arts and Crafts furniture.

NOSTALGIC: An apparently modest, shingle-sided cottage built in 1892 on Long Island and attributed to McKim, Mead and White, this one recalls the English gambrel roofs of southern New England.

Waves of Revival

First wave Pictured is the New Jersey Pavilion for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Based on George Washington’s headquarters at Morristown, this example from the end of the Victorian period added a ceremonial Georgian pediment—and a Victorian wrap-around verandah.

Transitional This typical Foursquare house has Colonial Revival details like the front door with sidelights (but no fanlight above), corner pilasters, and a modified Palladian window. Houses of this era often had classical or “colonial” features grafted onto Queen Anne or transitional house forms. These are not Colonial replicas. But they are no longer Victorian.

Academic Pictured is The Beverly, “A Stately Colonial Home,” from the 1927 Montgomery Ward catalog. Sales copy points to the Colonial windows and quaint entrance. Despite the obvious 20th-century date of this dwelling (and the fact that it’s being marketed to the middle class), this example, like most built from 1910 through the 1930s, is more academically correct that the transitional revival houses had been. The emphasis is on not only classical details but also the rectilinear, symmetrical forms of the 18th century. Many such houses build during the 1920s boom survive across the nation. The Colonial Revival reappeared after the Second World War, along with both formal classical and Early American interiors.

Click here to read more about Colonial Revival Interior Design.

Recommended Books

The Colonial Revival House
by Richard Guy Wilson: Abrams, 2004.
The early years of the Colonial Revival in America and its motifs closely overlap those of the Shingle Style. This is a one-of-a-kind, smart, beautiful volume that includes 275 photos for inspiration.

Colonial Revival Maine
by Kevin Murphy: Princeton Architectural Pres, 2005
A regional take on the development of a new colonial style (i.e., the Shingle Style) by late-Victorian architects. Classical and colonial influences are evident in architect-designed “summer cottages” in Maine’s seaside resorts. Period drawings and archival photos of interiors (very helpful!) are accompanied by exterior views and new photos.

What better to welcome guests than H. macrophylla ‘Glory Blue’.

Let me introduce you to my colorful friend LEONA . . . the acronym for five types of hydrangeas that will give you blooms for half the year or more: Limelight, Endless Summer, Oak Leaf, Nikko Blue, and Annabelle.

Hydrangeas are native to the Appalachian region of the U.S. and to the islands of Japan. H. quercifolia (Oak Leaf) and H. arborescens (Annabelle) are the only two North American natives; these species have made the Southeastern U.S. and Appalachia their natural habitat, growing from Florida to Pennsylvania in pockets of shade, in understory plantings, forest scenes, and on river banks. Gardeners in zones 6–9 can grow hydrangeas with ease.

In zones 7 and 8, blooms will stretch from May to October if you remember LEONA and site plants well. In my Georgia garden, Oak Leaf hydrangeas start blooming in May. After Oak Leaf, Nikko Blue and Endless Summer kick in, along with Annabelle. All three bloom close together, but the Nikkos turn green and shades of aqua after their classic blue shade, and may even show coral, rust, and chartreuse.

Endless Summer blooms multicolored on each plant, with blues, pinks, and lavenders. Endless Summer will blossom again well into summer to finish up in the fall. (I count on their russet, coral, and aubergine blooms for autumn arrangements.) Annabelle blooms hard through June, and then the white flowers turn chartreuse green for added color in July and August. Limelight, a new offspring of H. paniculata, provides the grand finale from July through September. Creamy white panicles turn lime-green, with coral-pink edging.

H. macrophylla ‘Nikko Blue’ cut short for a crystal globe vase: a single flower can be elegant.

As cut specimens, hydrangeas are a mainstay in floral décor. (Although the blooms of some hydrangea and viburnum—“snowball bush”—species resemble one another, the hydrangea is the better cut specimen, as its blossoms last longer.) Large, spherical, and colorful, hydrangea blossoms add drama to arrangements, and are dependable for months after they’re dried.

When you cut blooms, do so early in the morning, then allow the cut stems to condition in warm water before your handle and arrange them. A sharp, angled cut allows more surface area to be exposed on the stem, so that more water can be absorbed. Ask your floral supplier for a product called Hydraquick, which helps open the vascular tissue for greater water uptake.

Landscape, floral, and interior designer James T. Farmer III, arranging white ‘Annabelle’ and ‘Forever Pink’ blossoms.

In the garden, native soil amended with rich organic matter is the foundation for flourishing hydrangeas. Sunlight is key for bloom quality and quantity. For those of us in zones 7 and 8, Limelight, Oak Leaf, and Annabelle (or the paniculata and quercifolia species in particular) tolerate exposure to sun with plenty of water, but in the South these plants appreciate some high shade and solar relief, flourishing in spots with morning or late afternoon light. Though shade-tolerant and even shade-appreciative, hydrangeas, like all flowering plants, do require sufficient light to produce blooms.

The amount of water they need depends on the amount of sunlight: in full sun conditions, these plants need regular watering for hydration, leaf rigidity, and flower fervor. A hearty soaking two to three times per week ensures thorough watering of the roots.

The soil’s pH—whether it is naturally acidic or alkaline—is a major factor in cultivating hydrangeas. A more acidic soil, with a pH less than 7, keeps the blooms blue, especially with H. macrophylla cultivars such as ‘Nikko Blue’ and ‘Endless Summer’. A basic or alkaline soil with a pH greater than 7 will bring you pink and red blooms. To change bloom color, you may use aluminum, applied as aluminum sulfate. Coffee grounds, vegetable peels, and pine bark will mildly change pH. Adding lime de-acidifies soil, making it more alkaline. Acidic fertilizers do the opposite. By playing around with these, you can broaden the palette into jewel tones including amethyst purple, lapis blue, and peridot green. Given pockets of nutrients in soil layers, you can have multi-colored flowers on the same plant.

Dried specimens make a classic composition in a silver julep cup.

Hydrangeas root very easily. Simply stick cut stems into potting soil or directly into garden beds. Prune your hydrangeas twice a year, once during dormancy (I use Valentine’s Day as my benchmark, and remove spent flower heads and thin stalks at this time), and again during bloom—when you cut for arrangements. Canes removed during dormancy can be used for propagation; in mild climates, just stick the stems in the ground. Cutting during bloom encourages new growth and further bloom.

From the daintiest of lacecaps to the massive panicles of mopheads, hydrangea blossoms are spectacular grace notes in the garden. Plant wisely and you’ll have lots of bloom time as well as a year’s worth of table centerpieces.

Clark Mitchell and J.W. Brasher were guided in their restoration by a 1909 photo of the home—a gift from a descendant of the house’s original owner—which clued them in on the home’s original cladding and what sort of railing to wrap around the porch.

Whether you call it “electric blue” or “painter’s-tape blue,” the startling hue that coated the front-parlor woodwork in Clark Mitchell and J.W. Brasher’s turn-of-the-century Foursquare most definitely could not be called “period.”

The house had been built circa 1905 by renowned Dallas architect Otto Lang for himself and his family. But as the years passed, it changed hands many times as the once-thriving neighborhood around it fell to crime and decrepitude in the shadow of downtown Dallas’s rising skyscrapers.

When Clark and J.W. bought the house in 2004, it had been thoroughly remuddled. Originally a single-family home, it had been converted to an upstairs-downstairs rental duplex, with alterations to match: a second front door, a second-floor kitchen, a new room boxed in over the porch, and a staircase tacked onto the back. Its wood “teardrop” siding was cloaked in asbestos shingles. The house was in too woeful a state to inspire an initial rush of affection from its eventual owners. This romance unfolded in a more circuitous way.

Clark and J.W. had first fallen in love with a home of similar age in Munger Place, a planned community built in the early 20th century. That house, however, had such serious structural problems that a general contractor told them he could build a new house that looked old for half the price of fixing it. So Clark and J.W. did just that, purchasing a lot in the adjacent, more affordable Swiss Avenue neighborhood and designing a new-old house, inspired by J.W.’s grandmother’s West Texas home, where he fondly remembers family holiday gatherings.

The couple figured they would grow old in this home, but they couldn’t spend the rest of their lives looking at the sad old Lang house, which sat, neglected, across the street. So they bought that house, too, and set about restoring it. Their plan was to put both houses on the market and sell whichever one went first, then make the other one their home.

They had barely begun the restoration when a couple walking by struck up a conversation. Their contract on another house had just fallen through, and they lightheartedly asked how much Clark and J.W. wanted for the new-old house. Jokingly, the homeowners remember, they threw out a ridiculously high price. The couple went on their way, but, recalls J.W., they soon stopped walking, in serious discussion. They came back, and just like that, before it even hit the market, the new-old house had sold. The Lang house would be Clark and J.W.’s new domicile.

Home Work

The restored dining room includes homemade draperies, refinished woodwork, and the excavated fireplace.

Plenty of restoration work remained to be done. An investor who purchased the house in the late 1990s had started, but had apparently run out of steam. He had taken the walls down to the studs, yanked out the kitchens, and refinished the heart-pine floors upstairs before giving up, leaving the house unlivable. Clark and J.W. moved into the property’s 400-square-foot garage apartment (formerly the servants’ quarters) and rolled up their sleeves.

They started by “buttoning up,” as J.W. puts it, in preparation for winter. They hauled original windows from the garage and reinstalled them in their openings, which had been inexplicably boarded up. They brought in professionals to modernize the wiring, update the plumbing, and blow insulation into the walls. Then they set about making sense of the interior.

One thing that didn’t add up: An angled wall in the dining room was adjacent to a similar one with a fireplace in the parlor, so they reasoned that the dining room must have had a fireplace, too. “One of the first things we did was go in and pry off that wood to see if it really was there,” says J.W. Indeed, the planks pulled away to reveal an original brick fireplace. They hired a brick specialist to repoint the mortar, then purchased an appropriate mantel from a local collector. (They’d lucked out with the adjacent parlor mantel, which was the only unpainted woodwork in the whole house.)

Stripping the rest of the wood trim of layer after layer of paint—including that shocking blue—would prove to be one of the restoration’s most difficult tasks. Using chemical strippers and a heat gun, J.W. spent weeks on just two living room columns before consulting with general contractor Wayne Guthrie about alternative methods. Wayne responded with an unconventional approach, using a planar, precisely adjusted, to remove all the paint but as little wood as possible from virtually every inch of trim in the house so that it could be re-stained in the original style.

Modern granite countertops and appliances make the kitchen user-friendly, while salvaged wood floors hark to an earlier era.

Great Saves

The frugal spirit that led Clark and J.W. to build their new-old house once again guided them as they tended to the home’s remaining finishing details. J.W. throws the credit for bargain-hunting squarely in Clark’s court: “He’s one of those people who, if we see something we like and both think it’s too expensive, he’ll figure out a way to do it.”

Those novel cost-cutting approaches grace various rooms throughout the house. In the dining room, they re-hung draperies from the new-old house that Clark had sewn himself from material he found at fabric outlets. The light fixtures in the stairwell and dining room are treasures from the closeout aisle at a hardware store. They spent hours on the weekends sorting through spindles at a surplus store to re-construct the missing banister on the upstairs landing.

When it came to wallpaper, they shopped through DirectBuy, a service that enables consumers to save money by purchasing directly from manufacturers. They found a book of papers that were consistent in style with the house, then picked the patterns they would hang themselves. In the dining room, they chose one that “looks like it’s old and faded and cracked,” says Clark. For the front parlor, they made a near match to an old scrap of original paper they’d recovered. “It had the same color palette and a similar stripe to it,” says J.W. “It was kind of like, ‘I can’t copy it exactly, Otto, but I’m going to do the best I can here.’”

Clark refers to this sentiment as “channeling Otto”—both men take the original architect’s intentions seriously. “The man did some incredible work,” says J.W., noting his contributions to prominent Dallas landmarks like the Sanger Brothers Department Store and the Magnolia Building, with the iconic flying red horse on its roof. Clark and J.W. are honored to be ushering Lang’s own home into its next era, and they feel the weight of such responsibility. If Otto were to return tomorrow, says J.W., “I’d want him to walk in and go, ‘You know, I really like this. This feels like home.’”

To restore the missing mansard on his Italianate house, homeowner Harry Came dreamed up an unconventional plan: Build a new one on the ground and lift it into position.

In 1989 I moved to Waukegan, Illinois, and bought a wonderful little 1842 Greek Revival. It was a fantastic house, but I always wanted something a little bigger. As I walked my dog to the local park, I often passed a hulking 1872 Italianate that had seen better days. When, a few years later, I heard it was for sale, I jumped at the chance to buy the house—and all the huge projects it required.

One of the saddest elements of my new house was a truncated roof atop the central tower. It just didn’t look right—you could tell something was missing. I vowed that one day, I would make the roof whole again.

As I researched my home’s history, I learned it had gone through a lot since being built by a widow, Harriet Biddelcom, for her family. While the home only had two other owners before me, it had undergone many changes, including being turned into three apartments in the 1930s. Previous owners told me that the tower roof had “blown off in the 1940s,” but I believe it probably rotted away from lack of maintenance. After it was gone, asphalt shingles were slapped on the truncated form that had once been soldered in metal sheeting.

Resourceful Research

A view of the truncated tower before restoration. “It just didn’t look right,” says Harry. “You could tell something was missing.”

I had a poor-quality photograph from the 1930s showing my home’s original, handsome Second Empire concave mansard tower with roundel windows. Another house down the street bore a similar roof and some identical millwork; both gave me a clear picture of how I hoped to restore the roof.

My dream began to materialize the day I broached the subject with a neighbor and friend who also happens to be a master carpenter. Rich Rucinski had done some wonderful work on my house, including building new cabinets to match old ones in my kitchen, so I brought up my idea for the tower restoration with him, expecting a lack of interest. To the contrary, when I showed him what had been there and what the house might look like again, I saw a gleam in his eye. We soon forged a plan.

In its original incarnation, the tower and roof would have been built in situ on the house, by carpenters and tradespeople perched on scaffolding, ropes, or the like. Because Rich could only work on this project in the afternoons and on Saturdays, building a new roof on top of the house would have been impractical, dangerous, and more expensive, with scaffolding required for months. Rich also was worried this method would be harder on his knees. He suggested we build the tower on the ground, then “fly” it into position.

Design Tweaks

Before we started working, I had an architect friend, Steve Kolber, create drawings based on my research. We also made some small improvements to the design. For example, the original curve of the concave mansard had flared out considerably near the bottom of the roof. We decided to increase the angle (thus decreasing the curve) so snow and water wouldn’t accumulate there and potentially shorten the new roof’s lifespan.

Working on the ground in Harry’s driveway, Rich first assembled the ribs, which he cut using a template and a heavy-duty jigsaw.

The original covering on both the tower and the rest of the house was made of flat squares of tin that were hand-soldered and waterproof. However, putting a metal roof over my entire house was cost-prohibitive, so I made the difficult decision to place asphalt shingles on the house’s low-pitched roof. Asphalt wouldn’t do on the tower, however, so Rich and I decided to use round cedar shingles—a total of 2,000 of them. I painted them by hand pre-installation, and for weeks, I had clotheslines strung across my garden bearing shingles hanging out to dry.

Rich began the project by transferring the angles from Steve’s drawings onto 2x12s, using a compass to achieve the arc of the mansard. Then, he cut the boards with a heavy-duty jigsaw to create the common rafters. (This was no easy task because of two compound arcs; Rich created a template to get the correct cut.) He used the same technique on the hip rafters. Next, he applied ¾” plywood over the whole frame. Before attaching the shingles, Rich rolled felt paper and a layer of plastic mesh over the plywood. He then nailed each shingle by hand, using two galvanized nails. Even with the increased angle on the mansard, it was difficult for Rich to make the shingles bend enough to follow the roofline’s curve.

As the tower began to take shape, I started worrying that our proportions might not be correct. Despite our careful measurements of the existing footprint—which were the basis of the new design—once the plywood was added to the skeleton and then the mansard roof was constructed, I became certain that after the tower was set into place it would look giant, like an oversized lampshade up on the roof. (I even imagined my neighbors referring to the oversized fiasco as “Harry’s Folly,” but tried to keep those thoughts at bay—plus, as it turned out, my worries were completely unfounded.)

After Rich covered the framing with plywood, the roof was ready to get gussied up in decorative cedar shingles and copper accents.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the project was deciding what kind of decoration to include. (All of our choices, of course, were based on what was historically accurate, and what would suit the roof.) I discovered a roofing ornament company, W.F. Norman of Nevada, Missouri, which has been in business for about as long as my house has been in existence—it may have even provided the original roof decorations.

Because I wanted the project to last, I chose copper for the little gabled roofs on the bottom of each side, as well as for the hip roof and the finial on the top of the structure (although the only photograph I’d found was cut off at the top, a photograph of a similar roof with a prominent finial convinced me to add one), the hoods on the roundel windows, and scrolls and other decorations. I hired a wonderful coppersmith named Sock Woodruff from Custom Gutters in Lake Forest, Illinois, to do all of the metalwork.

In a breathtaking move, the 5,000- pound roof, suspended by its lifting arms from a crane, is hefted into position atop the tower.

Lifts and Balances

We originally planned to lift the roof into place using straps, but worried that the whole thing might be too top-heavy, causing us to lose some control in placing it. We also weren’t sure how we could remove the straps once the new roof was in place.

So Rich decided to build “lifting arms” extending from the corners of the roof, made of 2x10s we could chop off once the roof was in place. (The arms also would provide better stability since they were at the top of the roof instead of the bottom.) After the roof was in place, we planned to cover the lifting points at the four corners with a galvanized metal rope decoration from W.F. Norman.

Rich helps guide the roof into place. Afterward, he attached the roof to its new sills, then cut the lifting arms away to complete the project.

Early on the morning of the installation, Rich was up on the tower tearing off the old roof and installing new 2×10 sills to give our mansard a good, flat foundation. The crane arrived mid-morning—along with the mayor and all of my neighbors and friends. I was terrified, worried about lifting this 5,000-pound monster into place.

As the mansard rose, a hush fell over the crowd as it swung gently in air. The crane operator maneuvered it slowly into position and lowered it onto its new base, setting it into place among the existing gutters and original soffits, with their huge ornamental Italianate brackets and intaglio decorations. Rich then secured the new roof to the old with steel strapping, cut off the lifting arms, and covered the four corners with the pre-painted, zinc-coated roping. We had done it—placed the new roof onto the old house perfectly in one frightening, exhilarating move. With the new roof resting atop it, the house finally appears finished.

A

Geothermal pertains to the earth’s heat—and harnessing it is nothing new. Until the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, Pompeii was warmed by a sophisticated geothermal heating system. Italy was first to produce geothermal electricity in 1904.

Today, cities from Boise to Reykjavik use geothermally produced electricity. Klamath Falls, Oregon, captures ground heat and pipes it under roads and sidewalks to keep them from freezing in winter.

Geothermal power comes from heat stored in the earth—from the planet’s formation and the radioactive decay of minerals, and, nearer the surface, from the sun. A few feet down, the crust’s temperature is relatively constant at 45 to 58 degrees Fahrenheit, year round. Geo-exchange heat pump systems take advantage of this by circulating water or other liquids through continuous loops of plastic pipes buried in the ground (or a water source like a pond). Those are closed-loop systems; an open-loop option uses well or surface water as the exchange liquid, which is returned to the source.

The cutaway shows how an indoor, split-system pump delivers warmed air and preheats household water.

The fluid collects heat from the soil during winter and carries it through the system to a heat pump in the building, where the heat is compressed to produce more heat that warms air to 90 to 105 degrees, which is moved through the house via standard ductwork. Or it can send heated liquid through an under-floor radiant system.

During summer, a reverse process occurs as circulating fluids transfer heat from the building back into the earth. The very reliable, efficient system provides pleasantly even heat and year-round humidity control, and it’s much quieter than air conditioning.

Ground-source heat pumps also can be used to heat a portion of the hot water supply. In winter, the heat pump reduces water-heating costs by about half. In summer, heat taken out of the house is used to heat the water at great savings.

Pumps are the size of a small refrigerator or furnace and can fit in a closet (no venting is needed). When space is not available, a small, unobtrusive exterior unit such as that from ClimateMaster does the job. Maintenance is simple (e.g., filter changes). Underground pipes are expected to last 50 years and perhaps much longer. Ground-source heat pumps may be added to existing fossil-fuel furnaces to increase their efficiency.

The drawing depicts a closed-loop, liquid-to-air system using vertical loops—deeper but not as space-consuming as horizontal pipes.

Retrofitting an older house for geothermal heating is not complicated, but it may be expensive. The system can be installed in all but the smallest lots, under lawns, driveways, even the house. Pipes can be run horizontally or vertically, depending on the amount of land surface available. Horizontal installation involves laying pipes in trenches four to five feet apart at depths of three to four feet; this trenching will, however, disturb established landscape and tree roots. In space-efficient vertical installations, more expensive and perhaps complicated by the substrate, deep bore holes are drilled 10 to 15 feet apart.

The air handler houses compressor, air coil, blower, filter, and electronic controls; sizes and configurations vary.

Geothermal heat is cleaner than systems that burn fossil fuels on site and is considered easy on the environment. (You won’t be off the grid, though, as electricity is used to run the pumps.) Many states offer tax credits for installation of geothermal systems. A ground-source heat pump can be expected to decrease energy use 25% to 40%, sometimes much more. Upfront cost is high, however; units cost about $2500 per ton of capacity, or $7500 for an average house—almost twice the cost of a conventional system. Drilling can add $10,000 to $30,000. And depending on the particulars of the system, pumps last only about 15 to 25 years. Nevertheless, many homeowners are able to recoup initial installation costs after two or three to seven years. Some experts claim that, in the case of existing homes, it will take 16 to 20 years for a closed-loop system to pay for itself (in lower operating costs).

So. . . is geothermal heating and cooling for you, yes or no? Every site and situation is different. If you are truly interested in switching, consult local experts and installers. General guidelines, given current costs and technologies, look like this:

Do consider a ground-source heat pump if you are building new (or are substantially remodeling and adding space) and you have available land; if your current systems need to be replaced, you have already insulated, etc., yet your energy bills are high, and your property lends itself to trenching or boring; if you are a die-hard believer in going green by example (there’s a Prius in the driveway).

This sort of system is probably not for you if you have working heating and cooling systems in place and are not adding on; if you have little land or are sited on or near ledge (bedrock); if you would need to retrofit ductwork or radiant pipes; if you plan to sell before payback (three to 20 years, depending on installation costs).