Old-House Interiors July/August 2010

Editor’s Note
“Gothic is the architecture of passion, not perfection,” wrote the editor during the very first year of Old-House Interiors. “Gothic is an embrace of the random, the unfathomable, of mystery and decay! It is the opposite of the symmetrical, ordered, rational language of the Classical. Gothic is an architecture of extremes.” My goodness.

The editor was me and, yes, pointy exuberance does bring out the purple prose in me. If it’s Gothic and it’s architecture, I like it, no matter if I’m praying in Salisbury, or studying at Princeton, or cycling past a board-and-batten cottage on the Hudson. I find it all . . . exalting! . . . and can see in it no relation whatsoever to the Goth of studded leather and black fingernails.

Nowhere is Gothic sweeter, though, than in its 19th-century American incarnation. Tastemaker A.J. Downing and his collaborator, architect A.J. Davis, advocated for romance, in both their fine suburban villas and their “carpenter’s Gothic” cottages for the countryside. These were true American houses—of wood, not masonry—and with comfortable porches, which added yet another venue for sawn ornament and the gingerbread so beloved by Victorians. When a style comes to America, it is always delivered with a twist—one typically cheerful, confident, and expansive.

Now a new Gothic residence that is part villa and part cottage has been built in North Carolina. An artful and personal home, it’s everything sweet and lovely about American Gothic. But, if cusping bargeboards are not your thing, check out just how period-perfect the 1950s can be. A couple of mid-century modern mavens produced an interior that goes with the unchanged exterior. Calmly neutral, comfortably spare, rooms also include a dash of humor.

Patricia Poore, Editor of Old-House Interiors

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