Operable period reproduction shutters come with authentic architectural detailing and sympathetic hardware. Old-House Interiors August/September 2009
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Editor’s Note
You can gauge the aw-shucks value of a house style by whether it is represented in a ceramic Christmas village. Over the years I’ve been given a Farmhouse, a Country Store, an English Cottage, and a Carpenter Gothic Church. Now my desultory Internet search for Dutch Colonial buzz has turned up a ceramic house in that style. This little model is all over eBay, even though it was retired. It has the suburban Dutch Colonial’s cozy gambrel roof, homey shutters, barn-red color scheme—even a sun porch with its upper deck.
You know how some things are indelibly connected with child-memory, that dim and not always accurate file in your brain? The smell of Crayola crayons has you suddenly your kindergarten self; the word Adirondack tastes like marshmallows. For me, Dutch Colonial will always mean the same as Old House: Barbara’s house in New Milford, three doors away, built by Huguenots in 1693. An antique drawing in the hall depicted the house on a dirt path—River Road before pavement. The wood stairs were almost black with age, treads worn shiny smooth and concave at the center. My mother said the roof had a Dutch kick.
When it was time to move away from our own two-family, we looked at a few new houses in ’60s developments. A real-estate agent would walk us through unfinished rooms with strip flooring and vacant windows, and say “this one is a Dutch Colonial.” Even I knew they were referring to the broken, pitched roof, but these houses were not like Barbara’s. Neither, of course, are the Dutch Colonials of the 1920s, which are pleasingly old-fashioned yet comfortable, and, like the Tudors and Foursquares and Bungalows of the time, great fun to restore.
Patricia Poore, Editor of Old-House Interiors
