Small Home Gazette, Summer 2018
Letter From the Editor: a house lover’s fantasy
Here’s a fantasy shared by many old house lovers: What if you could go back in time to buy anything that was available the year your house was built? What would you buy? Original Gustav Stickley furniture? Rookwood or Grueby scenic tiles for your fireplace?
Recently I was playing this game while browsing through some vintage catalogs and magazines. In the ‘teens and ‘twenties, you could subscribe to Bungalow Magazine, which would arrive every month with a fresh bungalow blueprint supplement tucked into its pages. You could order a volume of bungalow plans for $1 from Keith’s Magazine on Home Building, published in Minneapolis. Need furniture for a built-in breakfast nook, or a colonnade with bookcases to fit between your living and dining rooms? The Curtis Woodwork Company had manufacturing plants throughout the Midwest, including one in Minneapolis.
If you walked into a store and told the clerk you were decorating your bungalow, she would instantly present a range of harmonizing paint colors, wallpapers and fabrics. Department stores would be packed with furniture, lamps and artwork that would fit the style of your home like the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
But if we’re being authentic, some unpleasant realities would tarnish your fantasy. If you painted your house it would likely be with Dutch Boy Lead White, sold by the National Lead Company. Yikes. Roof shingles might be laced with asbestos. On your basement workbench would be manual drills and handsaws, and you’d have to hand-crank each piece of clean laundry through a roller-wringer.
Perhaps the past is best visited in fantasy, where it can be selectively filtered through the warm glow of nostalgia. Besides, here in the present, you can find most items you need to repair or furnish your bungalow in period style, albeit at a price.
Still, there are a few things that haven’t come full circle. For example, wouldn’t it be great to find that all the vinyl siding companies had re-trained their crews to strip, prep and paint houses as efficiently as they previously applied vinyl? I almost wouldn’t mind telemarketing calls—each company touting the skill of their workers and the longevity of their paint jobs.
I’d say, “I’ve got some damaged window trim from when they put aluminum on my house back in the ‘90s. Can you repair it before you paint?”
“Of course!” the salesman would exclaim. “Our craftspeople can repair or replicate any style of historic woodwork on-site.”
“And my windows,” I’d say. “They’re not very weather tight; they need re-glazing, and a couple of sash cords are broken. Should I just replace them?”
“Good lord, no,” the salesman would admonish me. “The materials in your house are far superior to anything new we could sell you. We’ll restore them using methods that have been handed down through the generations, and they’ll easily last for another 80 years.”
Please don’t pinch me; this is one fantasy I don’t want to be snapped out of.
This commentary originally appeared in the Spring 2007 edition of this newsletter.
