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Simply Beautiful
Architect Gil Schafer combines nineteenth-century style with
twenty-first-century comfort in his new Greek Revival.
By J. Robert Ostergaard | Photos by Jonathan Wallen
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The living room features tall windows and French doors that
lead out to the screened porch. Paneled jambs between the living
room and dining room conceal storage cabinets for the stereo
and CDs.
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It may be true that "the devil is in the details," but when Manhattan
architect Gil Schafer III began planning his new weekend house in
Dutchess County, New York, he knew that selecting architecturally
appropriate details for his chosen American Greek Revival design was
just one of many necessities. Schafer wanted his new construction
to be historically accurate, naturally, but he also wanted it to have
a regional authenticity and to radiate a sense of belonging to its
surroundings. As the chairman of the Institute of Classical Architecture,
a nonprofit organization that promotes the classical tradition in
architecture, Schafer was also aware of the challenges of incorporating
modern necessities-air conditioning, heating, and electronics-into
a style of home that predates them. So he started planning his new
house by first considering the ways old homes evolve over time, exploring
the region's antique homes, and-with the assistance of landscape designer
Deborah Nevins-devising a landscape plan that would fit the finished
structure seamlessly into its environment. The result of these many
thoughtful considerations is a grand-but-compact (3,000- square-foot)
house that resembles an old family farmstead, enlarged and updated
in the mid-nineteenth century, and only recently restored by a gifted
architect. In fact, the effect is so complete that visitors to Schafer's
home have been known to ask when he finished the renovation.
Initially Schafer had intended to restore an original Greek Revival
in the area. As he soon learned, there are many. A local builder named
Nathaniel Lockwood constructed numerous Greek Revivals here when the
style was in fashion-from roughly the 1830s to 1860. Although the
style originated in Europe decades earlier, Greek Revival strongly
took hold in the United States after 1820, in part because Americans
looked to Greek Classicism as an expression of pride in their own
newly independent democracy. Schafer was drawn to old Greek Revival
homes because, he says, "The style is very American. Also, the compactness
of a Greek Revival plan lends itself to a compactness of needs." The
architect's intentions changed significantly when he fell in love
with a piece of property-a small knoll rising among dramatically rolling
fields and bordered by woodlands. So instead of a restoration project,
Schafer set about designing and constructing a new house that was
faithful to the local Greek Revival vernacular.
Along with exploring surviving examples of the Greek Revival in the
region, Schafer consulted pattern books by Asher Benjamin, who published
seven widely circulated carpenters' manuals between 1797 and 1843,
and Minard Lefever, who published three books for builders between
1829 and 1855. He consulted a more contemporary source, too: Carl
F. Schmidt's Greek Revival Details (1968). Schmidt's book is a rich
resource of period molding patterns, simplified outlines, and other
indigenous details. "It's all about immersing yourself in the details
and developing a fluency in the language of the style. You aren't
copying directly from your sources, but your work is deeply informed
by them," Schafer says.
Schafer was particularly sensitive to the ways in which historic homes
evolve over time. For his new Greek Revival, he chose a style popular
in Northeastern states that is sometimes referred to as a "penetrated
temple"-a templelike central structure with a wing on either side.
Most appropriately, the kitchen wing, or ell, was conceived as if
it were a remnant of an older, eighteenth-century structure. "What
you discovered when you visited these old houses was that the wing
came first," he says. "So, I thought, 'Let's build on that and reinforce
that notion through the details.'" Inside the kitchen, painted pine
floors and simple moldings add to the conceit that this is an older
wing. The fireplace, with its small warming oven, appears to be of
an earlier period. The ceilings are lower (8 feet 10 inches as opposed
to 10 feet in the main structure), and to access the guest bedroom
above the kitchen, one has to step down, as if entering a section
of the house that predates the rest. The kitchen wing has a lower
profile than the main faŤade, and the guest bedroom has small casement
windows in front. The columns supporting the kitchen wing's one-story
farmer's porch complement the Doric columns of the house's two-story
main portico. Looking at the exterior it is easy to imagine-if this
were an old house-that the farmer's porch and its columns were added
to give the exterior a uniformity of appearance. Indeed, Schafer says,
"If I were working on a historic home with an ell, this is what I
would advise to knit the facade together." The second wing is a screened
porch that's been "treated as an open-air porch, later enclosed,"
Schafer says.
A double- story portico graces the Greek
Revival. |
The landscaping proved an interesting and rewarding design challenge,
as Schafer needed to tie his house into an expansive topography of
rolling hills and steep grades and make it seem as if it was here
all along. "The way to do this," he says, "is to create a precinct
around the house to anchor it to its site." By doing so, the house
blends with its surroundings and does not look, Schafer jokes, "as
if it has been dropped from the sky." He and Nevins began by creating
terraces around the perimeter of the house, for example, establishing
a low terrace in front that serves as the motor court. A small barn
garage was built here, "to give the house some company, and to make
it seem even more anchored," Schafer says. From the motor court, visitors
are drawn up to the entry by grass-and-fieldstone steps. To the southwest,
another terrace rises from the screened porch toward the hills and
the setting sun. Regionally and historically appropriate landscaping
materials-including oak trees, hawthorns, lilacs, hornbeam, privet,
and maples-were sited to enhance the timeworn feel.
The landscaping plan was also intended to create a strong sense of
connectedness between the house's exterior and its interior. To accomplish
this, Schafer and Nevins fashioned outdoor rooms bounded by stone
walls and hedges that "allowed us to define individual spaces of differing
scale and character, while extending the visual axes of the house's
interior rooms out into the garden through distinct framed vistas,"
Schafer says. In fact, "The house is a kind of threshold through to
the garden."
Inside, the concept of visual axis is clearly evident: The floor plan
reveals a series of open sight lines from room to room and out into
the landscape. Stepping into the entry, for example, the visitor's
eye is drawn to the French doors at the end of the stair hall and
out to the rear terrace and the pasture beyond it. This effect is
more pronounced here than it would be in an old Greek Revival because
the direction of the staircase has been reversed so it does not face
the entryway. (This configuration also provides more privacy to the
second floor.)
The two public rooms to the right-the combination library and dining
room and the living room-are accessed by pocket doors off the entry
hall and the stair hall, and directly opposite them are French doors
leading to the screened porch. Schafer extended the windows in these
rooms to the floor, providing more interior light and drawing the
eye back out into the landscape. The centerpiece of each room is a
fireplace with twin Ionic-columned mantels that were salvaged from
a Greek Revival house in upstate New York. Unlike the floor plan of
an original Greek Revival, Schafer set the fireplaces back to back
in the center of the two rooms and placed a doorway on either side,
thus allowing for greater flow between rooms and opening two more
sight lines through the house. Because this is a modern house, Schafer
had to incorporate contemporary features his predecessors-men like
Lockwood-never had to consider. Take, for example, the necessity of
central heating. Rather than choosing elaborate decorative grills
that might call attention to themselves (and by their prominence risk
an anachronism), Schafer selected subtle bronze floor diffusers with
simple linear bar grills that are set into the floor so as to be almost
imperceptible. Similarly, air vents are flush with the ceilings, and
the air returns in the two public rooms downstairs are cleverly tucked
into the paneled door jambs. These panels also conceal another modern
convenience: a stereo system. In the kitchen, illumination from the
antique English rise-and-fall lights over the table is supplemented
by discrete pin spots in the ceiling and task lights tucked beneath
the cabinets.
With regard to his choice of historically appropriate building components,
Schafer was exacting. He designed the trimwork based on Greek Revival
patterns, and he specified 200-year-old, hand-sanded heart-pine flooring
for many of the rooms. The fanlights in the pediment were inspired
by a Greek Revival home in Falls Village, Connecticut, and the front
entry's transom lights and sidelights are antique glass. Salvaged
glass from old homes nearby was used in the kitchen cabinet fronts.
The door hardware is particularly noteworthy: Schafer contracted E.
R. Butler & Company in New York City to patinate cabinet latches,
levers, locksets, and keyhole escutcheons, and to fabricate silvered
"mercury glass" doorknobs set in solid brass shanks. These were the
first mercury glass knobs to be manufactured in nearly a century.
E. R. Butler & Company also applied a custom finish to the nickel
bath fittings and aged the brass bin pulls (from Pottery Barn) on
the kitchen drawers.
These finishing touches are only one part of what makes Schafer's
new Greek Revival so successful. More remarkable is how Schafer began
this house: with an immersion in regional antecedents, a vision of
how to accommodate the structure to its site, and a talent for bringing
contemporary necessities and modern sensibilities into accord with
a historic architectural style.
J. Robert Ostergaard is a freelance writer living in New
York City.
Salvaging the Past
Recycling old building parts is far from a novel idea. In the
sixth century, architect, mathematician, and city planner Anthemius
incorporated 107 columns salvaged from ancient ruins to build
St. Sophia Cathedral in Istanbul, Turkey (the fourth largest
cathedral in the world). In the early twentieth century, architect
Julia Morgan built William Randolph Hearst's castle in San Simeon,
California, incorporating entire ceilings, walls, and floors
salvaged from medieval castles and churches. Like great architects
from the past, Schafer too has masterfully introduced salvage
into his country retreat. He came across twin 1840s Greek Revival
mantels in an antiques shop years before he began to build his
country house. Keeping them in storage until he could find a
home for them, they have become the focal points of his living
and dining room. In the main areas of the house, Schafer incorporated
salvaged flooring from Baba. Each plank is hand-sanded and oiled
to re-create the well-worn look.
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