Bauhaus spirit, Yankee heart

The Boston Globe Magazine, August 4, 2002,
by Edgar Allen Beem
(Photo by Brian Vanden Brink)

Head Tide House stands square, white, and simple as a cake box on a hillside overlooking a bend in the Sheepscot River in Alna, Maine, east of Augusta... When architect Brett Donham and his wife, Priscilla, first saw it, however, Head Tide House was a village eyesore... The restoration started from the ground up. To relieve the pressure of water and saturated-clay soil, the granite-slab foundation was excavated, and drainage tiles were installed to direct water around the house rather than through the basement... The combination storm windows were removed, revealing the elegance of the Federalist windows, many with panes of handmade glass. The front door was replaced... Old clapboards... were scraped, sanded, and painted a proper New England white. A fake arched window over the front door was removed and replaced with the original window, which was found in the basement. The brick chimneys were rebuilt, and a new roofing system was installed over the shallow hip roof.

The only place the Donhams purposefully went over budget was on the interior... [Ragpainting] the walls and [skim-coating] the ceilings with plaster... create more richness and texture. Around the two shallow Rumford fireplaces in the main living rooms... 100-year-old pine boards [were used] to mill panels, shelves, and cabinets that possess the same honey glow as the oiled-pine floors.

The furnishings of the Federal-style country home run largely to Bauhaus designs by Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer. The modernist, less-is-more aesthetic proves a perfect complement to the yankee frugality of the house itself.

'Restoring this house authentically would have been a matter of great speculation,' says Donham, 'because there wasn't enough of the original fabric left on the inside to be totally confident what was original and what wasn't. We rebuilt it in the spirit of the old.'

The house was built in 1790, possibly as a center-chimney Cape, and was expanded in 1805. Over the next 200 years, successive owners remodeled continually: Donham estimates that the house is 40 percent additions.

'There are two schools of thought on historic preservation,' says Donham. 'One might be called the Williamsburg school, where you try to be authentic right down to the gnat's eyebrow. Museum-quality restoration wasn't something we were interested in financially. Then there's the school of thought that says buildings are living, breathing entities. They are a history of us and how we relate to shelter. It's better to keep all the history than to try to go back to some sanitized and probably fictional perfect day.'