That’s a beautiful home. Was it far from a city of significant size?
“Boston’s oldest house!!!”
Very cool.
Nowadays, with Madison Wisconsin greatly expanded, a 40 mile commute from Monroe is no big deal. (Actually, my dad was already doing it when he worked at Rayovac, taking a shortcut through Paoli). But back then it just wasn’t done.
https://imgur.com/a/0Td6uKw
This was my home for 3 years in the mid 90s. Built in 1797 (Third floor was added in the early 1800s). It housed the YWCA before WW2. According to neighbors it was what they called a “harlot house” for many years.
My house is a dodecagon for the main part, with octagon wings. It’s cool but also a pain in the ass. If I every buy another house it’ll be a boring rectangle.
I knew a guy who bought and lived in what had been the local brothel in La Grande, OR. It was apparently never repurposed–he showed me pics of the large swathes of red brocade flocked wallpaper, red velvet curtains and lavish application of gilding throughout. He said the decor amused him so he didn’t change it much and sold it on to someone else, no idea if they rehabbed the place or not.
Our house had been restored by the family we bought it from. No evidence of harlotry remained.
I grew up outside Portland, OR. The houses in our development were all pretty standard, all designed by one architect. Our plot was tucked in the corner with no flat land, just one big, steep hillside. The architect designed a custom home for it. I lived in it approximately from age 3 to 13
From bottom to top it is over five stories. Including in-between floors, like a sunken living room and a loft accessed via ladder, it has nine different floor levels. Most of it is open - half the large kitchen overlooks the family room a story below, from the landing next to the dining room you can see all the way up to the master bedroom three stories above.
Nothing that could be called a hallway anywhere. The common space on the floor with the kids bedrooms was room sized on its own, again open to below (we used it as the computer room).
Attic spaces were accessed through ordinary doors, such as behind my bedroom. It even has a central vacuum system.
Text descriptions don’t really do it justice. So a few years ago when back in town I brought my wife there and rang the doorbell. Luckily the owner was there and recognized my last name because they were still the same family that bought it from us. My wife got to witness this 80s suburban cathedral in person. If it ever goes on market with an open house, I’m bringing my kid to see it.
The house in Baltimore that my wife lived in when we married in 2011, and the house her daughter lives in today near Providence, are both large houses built in the early 20th century. In addition to the main staircases between the first (ground) floor and second floor, both have sets of back stairs from the kitchen to the second floor that also go up to the third (attic) level, which is where the servants’ quarters had been.
The Providence house also has a butler’s pantry between the kitchen and dining room, and a foot switch on the floor of the dining room for the host or hostess to signal to the staff that they were ready for the next course.
An expert who visited the Baltimore house (built in 1922) pointed out that the floor boards in the front hall were so long and thick that they were probably cut from trees that were growing before the Civil War. Although most of that house had been refitted with modern wiring, the living room still had active knob and tube.
Some great houses!
I lived in a log cabin for 10 years. I still have it . We built a conventional home on the same property 23 years ago.
When we moved to North Idaho in the early 90s we were looking at cheap real estate. Really cheap. After a little bit of house touring my wife said that she had decided that she had 3 must haves. Electricity, running water, and a phone. So picky! We found all of that on 10 acres. The water came from a spring fed cistern. I found a dead squirrel floating in it once. The electricity came via wires laid on the floor at the base of the walls with an outlet every 10 feet or so. It was great.
I’d love to know where that house is, since I live in PDX and I love our quirky architecture so much. Should you be inclined to drop a pin or summat.
I once lived in a converted Post Office. It was big and cold and too close to a busy road, but the rooms were kind of funky, and I kind of wish I still lived there. When we moved in, it had only just been bought and the renovations were crude. Here’s what it looks like now, 35 years later.
For some years, my wife and I lived in a beautiful old Victorian in an Ontario town. It was built in 1870, and some of the stanchions in the basement that held up the central beams were tree trunks, complete with bark.
I was surprised to find it in a town history book at the local public library, with a photo from circa 1905. Apparently, it had been built as a single-family house, with two storeys for the family, and the top storey for the servants. My wife and I occupied the top storey; and although the first and second floors had been split up into two apartments apiece, we had all of the third floor.
The only identifiable rooms up there were the kitchen and bathroom. The kitchen was small but serviceable, and had a sink, stove, and fridge, though our dining area was in another room. I guess we could have put the dining table in the front hall, because it was just off the kitchen and was pretty big. Our bathroom was huge, though I had to tilt my head to pee because of the angle of the roof, and the shower head was only four feet above the floor. So all the other rooms (three of them) became the bedroom, my office, and our library—it was lined with bookshelves.
The house had been upgraded over the years, so we had forced-air heating, and modern wiring, and reliable plumbing. But there were still some quirks. The second floor landing had a closet that had half a stained-glass window. Half for the second floor closet, half for one of the first-floor apartments. Why that was built that way, I’ll never know. The basement stairs seemed to be an afterthought (you didn’t have to duck if you were 5’6" or shorter), but there was a basement entrance from the back yard too.
But it was a wonderful house to live in. Solid as a rock, and I never worried when we got fierce summer or winter storms. Our house could take them—at the time we lived there, it had for 130 years, and there was no indication that it could not continue to do so.
I grew up in Haifa, Israel, in a building that was fairly normal for Haifa but weird for anywhere else. Much of Haifa is built on steep hills - the so-called Mount Carmel - and the buildings tend to conform to the topography. Our apartment building went uphill, which means that from the sidewalk you went up one flight of outdoor stairs to an indoor area containing the storage units and bomb shelter, then up another flight of stairs to an open courtyard with two apartments and two separate outdoor flights of stairs, then up one flight to another apartment and a narrow grass lawn, and then up one more floor to my apartment… which was a two-story condo with the bedrooms on the upper floor. Thus, to get to my room from the street, I had to climb one flight of outdoor stairs, one flight of indoor stairs, two flights of outdoor stairs, and one flight of indoor stairs. It was not what you’d call accessible. The view was nice, though.
Kept those glutes firm!
In 1956-8 (?) my parents had a house custom-built. The most unusual part was the swimming pool in the basement. A popular house-plan at the time was called split-level, which meant a ground-level part on one side, and the other side had bedrooms half-a-floor up, and the garage half-a-floor down. The bottom level had a pool and indoor patio area. If you want to look it up, it’s at 2110 Crestwood Dr., Anderson, Indiana. The front door had the doorknob right in the middle of the door. The living room had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The built-in desk in the den/office had a big spring-loaded platform for the typewriter. It would pop up for typing, and get pushed down to hide inside the desk. Instead of one packed coat closet for a family of 5, there was row of mini-closets, one for each of us. There was a wee closet upstairs for card tables, because my parents were in a bridge club.
By January 1979, urban blight had done for an entire neighborhood in St. Louis a little south of downtown (LaSalle Park), after it had been cut off from the rest of the city by freeway construction. I rented an entire house on South 9th Street from an old hippie for $20 a month. An old, crumbling, wreck of a house. It was the only inhabited house on the block; I had no neighbors. Nobody ever went there. An eerie stillness pervaded. There was water and electricity somehow, but no heat. There was a wood-burning stove. It was up to me to gather whatever deadfall I could find in the city (it was scarce) and bring it upstairs to the stove so I could cook food and survive the winter. In spring I found other accommodations.
The following year, gentrification began in St. Louis, and that neighborhood got all spruced up and rehabbed and now it features trendy bed-and-breakfasts in classy 19th-century architecture, which had been derelict in the ‘70s.
I haven’t lived in any place really interesting, but at one time my brother and his family lived in a lovely old house that was built sometime circa 1900. I don’t remember the exact year but he would have known as he had the original architectural plans for it. It had two staircases going upstairs, an big ornate one for the family, and a narrow enclosed one for the servants that led to the servants’ quarters. I think they just used that space for storage.
It had a lovely old fireplace that was originally coal-burning. They just burned wood in it. The back yard had massive old trees that were a testament to the long history of the house.
My brother also had one of those, too, bought new in a new suburban development sometime in the 60s. That was his first house and I loved it, but he and his wife later developed an aversion to suburbia, but I’ve always liked the practicality and modernity of it. They eventually relocated to the US and were truly in their element in the middle of Manhattan near the Broadway theater district!
I loved the family room which was half a flight down from the main living area. It was a cozy place that wasn’t a basement yet was separated from the rest of the house (the basement was another half-flight down a separate set of enclosed stairs). I slept there when I stayed over, and would watch old movies late into the night after everyone went to bed. Split levels were a convenient design – not sure why they went out of style.
Not super rare, but IMHO interesting – my mom bought a Sears home (Crescent model).
She bought it my Freshman year of college – I spent 3 summers there plus some time after graduation. After my mon died one of my sisters bought it and uses it as a vacation house (it is in a touristy area)
Brian
In Chicago, in the 60s-70s, I lived in my Grandparents’ 19th Century Sears Prefab Mail Order house.
When Dad dug into the crawlspace, he found 19th Century Beer & Medicine bottles.