Three Heirlooms

It's hot here (is it where you are?), which is why it's fortunate I'm still in Nantucket talking about island breezes and island houses.  Today's two Nantucket homes are very early American, very heirloom.  You know that this early American antique design is just one of the designs that I love.  Today, I will wallow in this heirloom-ness and not be conflicted about any other loved design aesthetics.  Come wallow with me.

Heirloom house #1 appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 2011.  As a child of ten, Sherry Lefevre once spent a summer in a rental house on Nantucket and vowed she would once own a home there someday.  When she came into an inheritance, she held true to her vow, bought the following house there...

and filled it with antiques.

Today, as an assistant  professor of writing at the University of Art in Philadelphia, she's immersed herself in the writings of Bronte, Hawthorne and Emerson, and somehow this literature is reflected in her home.  It has the feel of a seafarer's home filled with treasures from afar.

Still, it has all the comforts of today.

It's a matter of taste, I know, but the draperies seem too warm.  I so prefer Jacobsen's use of inside shutters, especially when it's as hot as today.

Draperies or shutters, it's a charmer.

The guest room.

Whereas Ms Lefevre bought an heirloom house, an earlier article from Colonial Homes featured the following new home but a new home filled with antiques.  Nantucketers love their antiques, and that can't be a bad thing.

The new house outside of town.

Great collection of antique lightship baskets and walking sticks in the foyer.

Newly designed table and chairs and antique china in the dining room.

Had to show the other part of dining room table for all the topiary lovers out there (like Loi and Phyllis).  Love the fireplace here.

Kitchen half of great room.

Other half.

Is it the interior shutters in the library that make me love this room so much, or is it just the comfortable furnishings and books on the shelves??  Whatever - it's a great room.

Airy bedroom with door leading to second floor balcony.

Nautical antique collection,

Hope you enjoyed these two homes.  I always have.  Now onto something very different thatI have always enjoyed and hope you might also - a short story by Dixie Lee Clifford, entitled Summertime on Laurel Lake which appeared in the July, 1984 Gourmet - the story is today's third heirloom. The setting is not Nantucket but New Hampshire, and it describes the summer vacation we all had once upon a time or should have had.  (I'm even including some of Gourmet's recipes at the end.)

My daughter and I read this story every summer, and as I was putting away my July Gourmets, thought you might like it as much as we do. (You are going to have to enlarge it, I think.)

I heartily recommend the blueberry cake and popovers, but, more importantly, did you like the short story itself?  The imagery is sooo lovely.  I was trying to just link it for you, but could not find the story on the internet.  So if you didn't like it or it was too long, I apologize.  You can take the English teacher out of the classroom, or the foodie out of the kitchen, but before long she pops up anyway.

Next time friends and dear readers (you are only "dear" if you actually read the story), I'll still be in Nantucket and soon Martha's Vineyard and then the Hamptons.
All in good time.
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Nantucket Seen Two Ways

If you have been following my blog, you know I am conflicted design-wise - warm and antique as my earliest posts demonstrate or serene and spare as Jacobsen and my latest posts demonstrate.  It's  taken me a while to resolve my conflict (actually it's still evolving), but maybe today's post will help to explain why I need at least five houses.  I fear that may be my only resolution.

Going back to a House Beautiful  from 1981, I found this antique-filled home on Nantucket.  I loved it then because the house itself was old and filled with beautiful antiques.  Today, antiques are passe; it is Restoration Hardware and Pottery Barn where the design conscious find inspiration to fill their new homes.  But, in 1981, it was frequently the antique shows which helped fill both old and new homes.
Below is a fine example of a Nantucket house owned by two antique dealers.

The Maddens' Nantucket home built in 1803.

Being quintessential antique dealers, their foyer is filled with antiques both indigenous to Nantucket and treasures found in "all corners of the globe."

Their parlor; today great rooms are de rigueur, but there is something special about a sort of off-limits-to-the-children-room.   A room where adults can entertain, read, or just think.  Must every room be open to the kitchen with a large screen TV?

Half of the Maddens' dining room chuck full of beautiful, antique objects and a great corner cupboard.  Love corner cupboards.  Love this one particularly.

Other half.  I know this room looks a bit formal, but the Maddens entertained in it frequently.  (I had a great article which showed a very fun group dining in this very room, and of course I cannot find it.  I probably will 30 posts from now.)  The candlelit chandelier inspired the one in our dining room.

Below, more detailed images of their Nantucket dining room.  Keep that corner cupboard in the back of your mind.

Later, the Maddens decided to move inland to Cape Cod.  Their historic saltbox house is featured in Mary Emmerling's American Country Houses, and even though their name is never given in the book, their beautiful antiques are featured and are tellingly distinctive.

Hearth in the new-old house.

The great room in the salt box with original pine beams now oxidized - this room was once the once the original kitchen.  Note please the red wing chair and the dining chair in the foreground - both from the Nantucket house.  (I feel like one of PBS's History Detectives.)

Larger dining room with different table and chairs.

But that corner cupboard is the same one - I'd recognize it anywhere - perhaps even some of the same china pieces and crystal.

Here the same Nantucket fire bucket from their Nantucket foyer.

Collection of Canton china in a kitchen cupboard.

More Canton, more cupboard.

What a kitchen!  Please note the lovely Nantucket baskets hanging above the island and the bargello needlepoint curtain over the window.  And that refrigerator and freezer!  Can you tell they love to entertain?

The other side of the kitchen with matching window treatment.  Firkin collection next to the arm chair are from the Nantucket house.

Oh, how I loved all this antique-iness and part of me still does.  But then in House & Garden, July, 1985, this article appeared.

And stole my heart.

How clean!  How uncluttered!

How simple and serene!  An even simpler home than the Jacobsen designed renovation for Eugenie Vorhees.  I can just hear my sons, "Well, Mom, there's a compromise between antique-filled houses and sterile ones."  But is there?

This is the Nantucket home of Abbie Zabar "who can't even put out a plate of cookies without arranging them."  Note the kitchen island stylized with strawberry branches, bread and cheese.

Table scape with a berry basket and a Zabar collage.

Window seat tucked into a dormer window.  I always admired the built-in drawers here and wanted to add them to our dormers.  When my husband explained the amount of dry wall dust that would arise, I sort of lost the spirit.  Seeing it again makes me think I could stand a little dust.

The main bedroom still has the old pine floor and original fireplace.  Abbie Zabar crocheted her initials and pine trees on the pillow cases of the plain white bedding.

Fireplace and linen cupboard freshened with sprigs of lavender.  I'll bet the fireplace shovel is antique - there has to be one antique in this home somewhere.  It's Nantucket after all.

A simple honeysuckle wreath in the kitchen window.

I aways found this perspective of the kitchen a charming one.  That simple door opening onto the simple kitchen, that great cupboard with white dishes and baskets - they all spoke to me and said, "Billie, it's time to clean up your act.  Declutter, add white and be spare."  But, I still love my antiques.  And white houses seem never to have cats who throw up or children who eat on the sofa.  What to do?  What to do?

Scenes from outside the house follow.  Also serene and simple.  Very Nantucket.

Even the Nantucket landscapes near Zabar's house whisper, "Simplify, simplify, simplify."
"I'll try," I murmur back.

The Potted Herb by Abbie Zabar is a delightful book full of information on herbs and topiaries with illustrations by the author.  It is as charming as it is informative.

The following images of her terrace point out that Abbie Zabar knows whereof she speaks (or writes.)  Both are from the New York Times.

I leave you today with images of summer food from another July Gourmet pulled down from its shelf.  Food, table scapes and Gourmet are three things that never bring me conflict.

Ah, summer berries and salads on beautiful table arrangements bring only peace and contentment, never conflict.

Please stop by next post, dear readers and friends, when I promise to bring you more peace and contentment with only a splash of conflict.
b