A Note from the Editor: Fireplace Memories
A friend living in an 18th-century house responds to bungalow interiors with recognition: it’s so cozy! The immediate embrace, by so many different people, of Arts & Crafts interiors makes…
A friend living in an 18th-century house responds to bungalow interiors with recognition: it’s so cozy! The immediate embrace, by so many different people, of Arts & Crafts interiors makes me wonder if it is instinctual. I think it is wholly American. It has something to do with the woods and the frontier, even Daniel Boone. (My boys wore out the Fess Parker movie, polyester-coonskin caps on their little heads.) Didn’t Abe Lincoln grow up in a log cabin and learn to read in the dark?
For me, it started in the Adirondacks. (Aaa-da-RON-dack, I love that word.) On family vacations when I was very small, we stayed in the mountains, in a cluster of little cottages, and we called ours The Bungalow. It was a whitewashed cottage with dark green shutters—the typical summer rental, with a color scheme popular from about 1840 through the 1960s. Inside, it was dark and woody, its old pine floorboards sponge-painted over black. The stone fireplace was central. Its rooms were of the period, Fifties knotty pine meeting a leftover Arts & Crafts Rustic. This is, I’m sure, why I yearn for dark interiors, unpainted wood, small low-ceilinged rooms, fireplaces, and cold nights.
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Is Arts & Crafts a smell? Misty mornings with the scent of a damp wool sweater, thrown off at mid-day for an orange life-jacket laced up in the aluminum canoe, Coppertone at the ice-cold lake, the sudden aroma of frying smelts in the cabin’s galley kitchen? And the dust and smoke in the woody rooms, last night’s carbonized sugar from marshmallows burnt on green twigs. Cool balsam and slimy mushrooms and a fine layer of humus.
Is Arts & Crafts a sound? The scr e e e k–THWACK of a wooden screen door, the hollow incompetent clunk of oars, kids yelling around the tether ball?
American Arts & Crafts houses, with their fireplaces, their wood and stone, ginkgos and acorns, pine boughs and clay pots, reminds us of all this. It’s primal . . . don’t you think?
Patricia Poore,Editor
ppoore@homebuyerpubs.com
10 Harbor Rd., Gloucester, MA 01930
Patricia Poore is Editor-in-chief of Old House Journal and Arts & Crafts Homes, as well as editorial director at Active Interest Media’s Home Group, overseeing New Old House, Traditional Building, and special-interest publications.
Poore joined Old House Journal when it was a Brooklyn-brownstoner newsletter in the late 1970s. She became owner and publisher and, except for the years 2002–2013, has been its editor. Poore founded the magazines Old-House Interiors (1995–2013) and Early Homes (2004–2017); their content is now available online and folded into Old-House Journal’s wider coverage. Poore also created GARBAGE magazine (1989–1994), the first unaffiliated environmental consumer magazine.
Poore has participated, hands-on, in several restorations, including her own homes: a 1911 brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and a 1904 Tudor–Shingle Style house in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she brought up her boys and their wonderful dogs.
