Old Glories

Very old houses mysteriously absorb into their being something of the lives they’ve lived; each develops a unique and inimitable character. As American house expert Henry Lionel Williams wrote, “Who can say that a house that has been lived in for two hundred years is not at least partly human?”

Today the best old houses seem, if not quite human, then certainly organic, having grown to keep up with their inhabiting families and with fashions and standards of changing times. Intimate in scale — almost like groupings of toy boxes — they tend to ramble this way and that, and to be all the more charming for their oddness and unpredictability.

The Gentleman’s Quarters

In 1732 a young farmer named Charles Green began buying land in the desolate Greenwich backcountry, and built his homestead on Round Hill near the New York border, the highest point in town. Though Green lived to be ninety, he left almost no imprint upon Greenwich’s historical record — unless you consider his house.

Two years ago Earl Nemser, a trial lawyer born and bred in Manhattan, became the tenth owner of the house that Green built. A  bachelor with two grown daughters, Nemser stayed with a friend on Conyers Farm for a year before deciding to buy in the backcountry, near the riding trails that he loves. “I didn’t want anything ordinary. I just couldn’t see myself living in some Dallas-type cookie-cutter mansion,” said Nemser, who has eased away from litigating complex cases for Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft (his storied career includes a win before the U.S. Supreme Court) and assumed the vice-chairmanship of a high-tech brokerage house in Greenwich. 

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Nemser guided me into the oldest section of his house, the living room, with its heavy chestnut floor, hand-hewn beams, burnished wood paneling and wide brick hearth festooned with wrought-iron tools. “This is the original floor,” he says. Each broad plank of the circa 1742 floor has a slightly wavy surface with pocks and gouges smoothed by generations of wear. “It’s amazing to look at, this floor. The weathering, the grain. Isn’t it just beautiful? It’s like a piece of art. The underside still has the bark on it, if you look from the basement.”

The previous owner, Frank Snyder, had also been a lawyer. As Snyder neared the end of his life he wanted to ensure that his beloved house passed into friendly hands. Snyder had seen too many old beauties succumb to modernity’s backhoe, centuries erased in a day. Snyder had his homestead designated a Local Historic Property requiring future owners to get approved from the Historic District Commission before altering the exterior of a building. Snyder died six months after the sale, but he got his man. “I’m a steward. I’m here for a small blip in the history of this house,” Nemser says.

The Green house is composed of an original saltbox and three added wings. The saltbox portion, pristine and white, gazes upon the junction of Round Hill Road and Creamer Hill Road much as it did when British soldiers and their American sympathizers terrorized backcountry homesteads during the Revolution. Legend holds that British dragoons under “Bloody Ban” Tarleton commandeered the Green house during one of their frequent raids into Connecticut from British-occupied Westchester.

When Frank and Jesse Snyder bought the house, in 1952, it lacked plumbing (an outhouse sat in back) and had only rudimentary wiring. In bringing the house belatedly into the twentieth century, Snyder tripled its size. He did so creatively, transporting a 1680 house from Plainfield and joining it to the original structure with a long “connector” wing made partly from beams and hardware salvaged from eighteenth century houses. Nemser has made the 1680 wing his home office. Its antiquity is palpable. The wood paneled walls are particularly arresting, milled from Bunyanesque trees. “This panel looks about two feet wide,” Nemser said, brushing his hand across the widest one. “You have to think that the tree was 300 years old in the late seventeenth century, when it was taken down. It’s an awesome thought: The trees that make these walls were from the time of Columbus.”

Nemser saw quickly that his new old house needed twenty-first century updating. The rooms were dusky with the low ceilings and cramped doorways of old.

“I didn’t want to live hunched over like a candlestick maker. I wanted to be able to be my modern self, and retain the good elements of the past.” Greenwich native Joanna Heimbold, of David Netto Design in New York, helped Nemser make a thoughtful transition. “We could have scooped out the whole interior,” she says, “but we wanted to honor the history of the house. At the same time we didn’t want this to be an exact duplication of a 1740s house. Susan Richardson of the Historic District Commission says, “Earl has had a wonderful relationship with us.”

Nemser added a master bedroom suite, which blends perfectly with the house’s spartan exterior while adding modern luxury. Another bold stroke was to remove the ceiling above the kitchen to create the house’s only loft-like space. Often, however, their changes brought the house closer to its original state. The dining room ceiling seemed especially low — “I felt burdened by it,” Nemser remarked — and when the boards were ripped down, Nemser and Joanna found lovely old beams that are once again exposed to view.

There was one particularly intriguing discovery. When removing years of paint from the study, workers found that a new wall had been built on top of a very old one. The old wall was painted by hand, a delicate pattern of blue bricks that probably dates to the eighteenth century. “I’m going to display it in this house in some way,” Nemser says. The find inspired him to commission, for the dining room, hand-blocked wall paper that seems both fresh and old-fashioned at the same time. Nemser hopes eventually to adorn his house with paintings by early American modernists like Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley, known for their bold, semiabstract forms. Artists and decorators have long noted the curious harmony between old American houses and modernism. Early Americans understood in their bones the notion that “form follows function” centuries before Mies made it a modernist axiom. Nemser put it like this: “There’s a lot of elegance in simplicity. I wanted to bring new things to the old world, and old things to the new world, and marry them in an almost musical way.”

A Sweet Saltbox

If houses are like people, then the Benjamin Mead house, on Orchard Street in Cos Cob, is like an old fellow with joint replacements, a Viagra prescription and a young girlfriend. “It’s a brand-new ancient house,” said the girlfriend, er, current owner, Lisa Druker, a psychotherapist with an office in Cos Cob. “Do you want to know about the ghosts?”

This classic New England saltbox is the oldest inhabited house in Greenwich — built in 1697 — and one of just two seventeenth century structures remaining here. (The other is the disused Thomas Lyon house, from as early as 1670, on the Post Road near Port Chester.) One might expect an old house in the back country to endure, but in the heart of populous, fast-changing Cos Cob, such a house should have been wiped off the block years ago. Thus the primary story of Benjamin Mead’s house is one of survival.

The Mead house has seen multiple changes. In 1999 local architect John Diamontopulos bought and updated the house. The result is both beautiful and comfortable — a seventeenth century dwelling with bright, spacious interiors and radiant heating. Yet Diamontopulos’s work poses  a tricky question. Where does restoration cease and rebuilding begin? The answer depends on whom you ask. But one should remember that many restorations, good and bad, have attended the house in its 300-year history. Fifty years ago it sported an ugly front porch. The fieldstone foundation was covered in stucco. Gorgeous beams had been plastered over and two of three fireplaces sealed up. The house looked more authentic in 1997 than in 1957.

Diamontopulos, for his part, said the Mead house was rickety when he bought it. Examining a pre-renovation photo, he said, “It’s not an optical illusion that you see. The house is pitching downhill. If you put a marble on the floor it would race from one side of the house to the other.” Floor beams had rotted out and the ancient mortar, made of horsehair and clay from Strickland Brook, had turned to powder. The fieldstones had shifted, skewing the walls. “Every time a piece of house slid off the foundation, they just built another interior wall. So one wall ended up that thick,” Diamontopulos said, spreading his arms wide. “When I took it apart I found shoes from the 1800s in there. Old lace-up shoes. And kids’ toys and medicine bottles.”

Diamontopulos stripped the house to its massive-beamed skeleton. He dismantled the foundation and chimney, cleaned the old stones, and built them back into place. As he worked away, neighbors would pass by and impart bits of Mead lore. “They’d ask, ‘Did you find the cannon ball?’ Evidently during the Revolution, a cannon ball pierced the roof and went into the chimney. But no, I never found it.” According to one historic account, a twenty pound cannon ball was found in the yard.

When Diamontopulos finished, the shingle exterior lacked the peculiar charms of crookedness, but did look authentically old, if much freshened. The interior no longer possessed the dark, heavily wooden cast of American antiquity. But some defining elements, the weathered beams and stone chimney, hold their luster.

“These beams are magnificent,” says Lisa, looking at the dining room’s colossal summer beam. “You just don’t see anything like this.” The workman’s hatchet marks are plainly visible, and make such an appealing pattern that one wonders if they were intended for decorative effect.

The chimney is enormous, a room of its own, rising like a four-sided pillar through the heart of the house. “A very fat Santa could fit up there,” Lisa remarks. The fireplaces open broadly on three sides: living room, dining room and den. “You can get these huge, roaring fires going, just like in Colonial times.”

But ghosts? Lisa doesn’t take them seriously, not quite. Once she was sitting in the kitchen when she noticed her dog, Sophie, staring intently into the fireplace. Sophie’s hackles rose and then she ran quivering to the shelter of her master’s legs. Later, Lisa ran into the house’s former owner, Margaret Rogers, who lives nearby. “Hey, I think Sophie just saw a ghost,” Lisa joked.

Margaret seemed unsurprised. “Oh, that’s the ghost of Benjamin Mead.”

When contacted, Margaret says, “Well, who knows, but if there is a ghost, he’s a friendly ghost.” After the death of her father, Margaret noticed (among other light mischief) that her family Bible kept returning unaccountably to her bedside table. Like Lisa, she laughs off these gentle hauntings. Still, Lisa adds coyly, one day an allegedly psychic friend dropped by and informed her that Benjamin Mead’s ghost lives in the chimney — with his cat.

Writer’s Retreat

If you seek the soul of a distant Greenwich, you can find it at Bydale. The rambling estate on John Street, with its 1734 farmhouse, horse barn, cottages, wandering brooks, and shade trees, embodies a low-key prosperity that is now sadly out of fashion.

Bydale’s depth of spirit derives from two intertwined histories: that of the old farm itself and that of the Warburg family, which has owned the estate for eighty-four years. The philanthropist Joan Warburg moved to Bydale at age twenty-four, in 1948, after marrying James P. Warburg, a noted banker, author and adviser to presidents (not to mention poet, lyricist, and painter). “Oh, he was brilliant,” Joan said of her husband, who died in 1969. “I’m the only thing that saved the kids from being geniuses.”

In the summer of 1925 James Warburg set out on horseback from a summer rental in Rye. Crossing into northwest Greenwich, he soon found himself on a wooded, and uninhabited, estate in the Byram River valley. Warburg liked the “tumbledown” farmhouse well enough, but it was the stately sugar maples and profusion of wildflowers that stirred his passion. A scion of an international banking family, Warburg was then married to the songwriter Kay Swift. But city life, divided between hard-working days and prodigal twenties nights, had begun to fatigue him. He craved the tranquility of country living. Bydale wasn’t on the market, however, and the owner, Benjamin T. Fairchild, was known to hold fast to every square foot of his vast back country acreage. When the two met at last in New York, Fairchild showed no inclination to sell. Then he asked, “Don’t you think a carload of rhododendrons would improve the place?”

“Good God, no!” Warburg blurted.

“Very well then. You can have the place. I just didn’t want to see Bydale turned into a Long Island estate.” (Fairchild was a lover of wildflowers. The sanctuary off North Porchuck Road, once owned and nurtured by him, now bears his name.)

Bydale allowed Warburg to find his own beat, distinct from that of his famous family. “This really was an unadorned farmhouse,” Joan says. “Jimmy had grown up in fairly pretentious surroundings, and he fell in love with Bydale because it was so completely different, quite different from most of the Warburg houses.”

Bydale is the locus of an unlikely bit of pop history. In summer, Kay would import her New York smart set to the estate. George Gershwin was a frequent guest. He stayed in the charming cottage by the mill pond (since burned down), where he wrote portions of Rhapsody No. 2 and Porgy and Bess. The leading characters in George and Ira Gershwin’s 1926 hit Oh, Kay! are named for the Warburgs, though the setting is shifted to rhododendron-plagued Long Island. (Warburg and Kay separated in 1934.)

Lasting tranquility came to James Warburg — and Bydale — when he married Joan Melber of Bronxville in 1948. At first the Warburgs divided their time between East 70th Street and Bydale, but Joan, wanting to raise their children in one place, lobbied for full-time residence at Bydale. Mostly, change has come slowly to Bydale. James’s goal had always been subtle improvement, not wholesale revamping. The low-slung shingled farmhouse, nestled in a hillside and surrounded by his beloved sugar maples, was indeed more primitive when James bought it. The hallways were narrow and upstairs was reached by one small staircase and two chicken ladders. The rafters were rough saplings.

These rustic charms might have gone unchanged. But in 1951 a floor beam near a chimney flue caught fire and gutted the western wing. Floors, shingles, shutters, window-frames and dormers were salvaged and used in the reconstruction. “Consequently,” James wrote, “the house looks just as it looked before.” The interior was modernized slightly — a wider front hall, an opened-up living room — and of course no trace of saplings or chicken ladders remains. With its oak and poplar floors, eighteenth century antiques, hook rugs, finely carved mantelpieces, paper-heaped desks and book-lined walls, the house bespeaks quiet country elegance. Joan surveys the living room and says, “This house, as you can see, is lived in. That’s the important thing.”

She leads the way to the backyard. Atop the hill lies the old barn and stable, part of which James fashioned into a library adorned with sculptures and paintings (including a Jan Steen bought in Amsterdam for twenty-two dollars). There’s also an expansive vegetable garden, a greenhouse and a caretaker’s cottage. The kindly caretaker, Fred McKenna, exemplifies durable Bydale tradition. “Freddy’s sixty-five now, and he’s been on the place since he was ten years old,” Joan says. “He loves it! I say, ‘Freddy, you can’t retire until I die. Too bad, you’ve got to hang around.’ ”

Joan notes the behemoths that have risen nearby and turned wistful. “They’ll probably tear this house down when I go. It’s just heartbreaking. Unless they find somebody who appreciates it.” Then she laughs her youthful laugh and suggests that economic woes may foil such grand plans. “No, I can’t imagine living anywhere else,” she says.

“I plan to stay.”