Sourcing Craft Skills For Heritage Restoration

Long after initial repair and repainting, the bungalow is weathering well

 

“Hiring someone else to do things has its own set of problems. For one thing, most contractors are set in their ways, and a lot of them don’t understand old houses. And even people in the trades have bought into the ‘no-maintenance’ crap to some extent, and like many people they are motivated by money, so the guy you hire to clean the gutters will try to talk you into replacing them instead (more money for him) or whoever you call to fix the windows will try to sell you replacement windows (also more money for them.) And people just seem to have gotten out of the habit of fixing things. …In either case, it’s important to educate yourself, whether you plan to do any work yourself or not. Armed with information about the way things used to be done, or ought to be done, in the house will be useful when you are told “nobody does that any more” or “nobody makes those now- you need to get X.” Jane Powell, celebrated bungalow author

Summer 1988: house and grounds as they appeared in the year of purchase

 

 

Many factors work against heritage homes keeping their original look and feeling, foremost a lack of awareness on the part of homeowners and poor craft skills among contractors. Few of us today are even handy, let alone knowledgeable about heritage carpentry or the mysteries of knob and tube wiring. The easiest, quickest choice is to agree to have it torn out and replaced by contemporary models. After all, our contractors work in the idiom of the day, prizing speed of execution and invariably using the cheapest materials. But you simply can’t keep faith with the details of an older house if your starting point is current materials and skills. On bungalows, accurate proportioning and appropriate materials largely constitute the details.

When I bought the Hubert Savage bungalow back in 1988, I had no inkling there were special skills needed to repair something in the spirit of original work. All I knew was that the house itself had character, inside and out, and that I was determined to keep it intact. This was a brave choice, as it always is, somewhat foolhardy and definitely (as I would soon learn) not for the faint of heart! My choice of a 75-year-old wooden house positioned me to learn the hard way about the modern building culture’s disregard for the special needs of older houses. Fortunately for mine, I didn’t get too far down that path before correcting course – but it could so easily have been otherwise!

 

1999: 11 years on, repair is finally under way

 

 

I’d been seeking a house with pedigree, what’s often referred to as ‘a character home’ in local parlance: meaning exposed wood, a fireplace in a generous living room, some built-ins and maybe a window seat. Also, in my awareness, a house whose appearance beguiled the eyes rather than flipping them the bird, as so many stucco boxes now do. I didn’t know this often meant 'Arts-and-Crafts,' yet. But when I first saw the Savage bungalow at an open house in the week it appeared on the market, I knew it was for me before I had even made it through the front door. I was seduced by its distinctive cross-gabled façade and its welcoming verandah replete with heavy timbers and tapered stone piers. Perched high on a rocky, treed site, it just oozed curb appeal (even though there were still no curbs, this being original suburbia) and charm: a small, artistic house in a picturesque setting. The would-be gardener in me was also thoroughly taken with the possibilities of the site, which seemed inexhaustible.

 

Rotten trim boards and siding near ground being replaced after ninety years

 

Touring the inside with a gaggle of other potential buyers, I immediately noticed some of the same incongruous updating that had put me off in other character homes. Typically such ‘remuddlings’ (as Jane Powell refers to them) vie baldly with the original program, inducing pessimism about ever succeeding in putting it right again. If you find yourself doubting the money and effort it would take to undo some garish twist of decor, the message is that you likely aren’t really sold on the underlying structure. Here I felt strangely indifferent to the mistakes, cavalier even about setting them right. 

 

Stripped down, ready for the new pieces: a scary point in restoration

Trim, skirting, water table and siding renewed, shingle roof finally going up

 

 

Of course, kitchen and bathroom had been redone on the cheap (Cubbon Home Centre quality) with some jarring faux effects: remember ‘cultured marble’ countertops, that unlovely amalgam of cement and glossy plastic finish? Motel shower tub (no shower in sight). Errors of judgment (wall-to-wall shag carpets in the rear of the house), crude alterations (wall ripped out of the back porch, scars unhealed) and tacky repairs (plywood panel and lion's head knocker in the Craftsman front door) rounded out a list of accumulated sins thoughtlessly visited on an innocent older house. And there was, of course, long-deferred maintenance inside and out, with some ominous unknowns like a missing crawlspace door. I winced at these challenges yet still wasn’t put off, because the house had such great bones and so much of its original detailing was intact. Despite manifold affronts to its character, I saw an aesthetic whole worthy of restoring to its original glory. Throwing caution to the winds, I put an offer on the place that evening.

 

 

Thirteen years later, renovation and paint are aging well - or so we thought

 

 

 

Lack of experience with older buildings – really, with buildings of any kind – meant I hadn’t a clue what I was actually getting into, almost guaranteeing that my initial efforts would go amiss. And they did! Optimistically, I hired a man advertising himself as a ‘retired craftsman’ to fix a few things at the outset of my tenure, such as the crumbling firebox in the living room. He turned out to be a total imposter, and I had to send him away and then quickly try to undo the impressive damage he managed to wreak in just a few hours on the job (like slathering grey woodstove cement all over loose firebox bricks and their decorative cheeks, for example).

Trouble in paradise: a drooping soffit signals hidden rot missed initially

Sinking feelings accompany a new forced journey into the great unknown

 

 

One thing I understood from the outset was that water had to be kept out of the building, so my second foray in renewal was getting the rotted gutters and missing downspouts at the rear of the house fixed prior to the next rainy season. I resolved to use more-qualified personnel this time out. Rejecting metal replacements – a latent purist from the start – I opted instead to source clear cedar guttering from Vintage Woodworks. Watching a European carpenter put them up in what appeared to be a professional manner, I began to realize just how much finesse it takes to install custom historic components. It would turn out though, a few years on, that even this journeyman carpenter didn't know the finer points of installing wooden guttering (like treating the insides with pitch in order to protect them from rot, and aligning cut angles perfectly in order to ensure proper drainage). These failings would lead slowly but surely to premature replacement of these gutters, a half century sooner than should have been necessary.

 

Master carpenter Vern Krahn, skilled at replicating wooden components

 

 

The journeyman carpenter who replaced my wooden gutters also repaired a crude wall opening that accommodated a cat door, affording easy access to local tomcats. This required sourcing some of the elegant bevelled siding that reinforces the Savage bungalow's distinctive horizontal lines. After he’d finished the job, it was apparent that the new pieces of wood were marginally smaller in dimension than the originals, a fact that tended to broadcast the repair rather than blending it seamlessly with the background. This misstep forced further learning on my part: about the necessity of replacing 'like' with 'like', and the fact that 'like' usually isn’t available off the shelf, and finally by extension, that it was necessary to locate the skill-set that enables 'like' to be custom-made with precision. This also gradually brought about the realization that all assumptions had to be clarified carefully in advance of any work happening.

 

 

Fitting replacement blocks on the barge boards: precise work in a difficult location

 

 

 

My awareness of carpentry to that point was sketchy at best: framing for putting up new buildings, trim carpentry for finishing (in short, notions drawn from my experience of the modern building culture). It turned out there’s a third form of carpentry that includes both elements plus all the craft-skills typically missing in between – namely, an ability to exactly fashion replacement components and so replicate original work, referred to as ‘joinery’. For upkeep and restoration of older wooden buildings, you simply must find a carpenter with architectural joinery skills, which is a very rare beast (and getting rarer). And this person ideally also has knowledge of historic building processes, so is a heritage carpenter to boot, which is even rarer still.

 

 

 

Now restored: seamless repair ready for painting to mask the intervention

 

 

So began my reflections on the special ways needed to work with older buildings. Turns out it takes as much planning and investigating as it does doing. Fortunately I’d recently become Saanich Council Liaison to the municipal heritage advisory committee, which began my schooling in the mysteries of renewing and recycling older structures. This led me in turn to formally designate my own bungalow (heritage-listed already) in order to protect it from unilateral changes by other owners down the line. Designation is in effect a special type of zoning that removes a homeowner's ability to willy nilly alter the exterior form of a heritage structure, without securing approval from the heritage advisory committee. This gives some assurance that what's being proposed is more likely to fit with what already exists. Taking this step fortified my personal resolve to gather the knowledge needed to repair and restore with true fidelity to the art expressed in the original.

 

 

 

Summer 2011: Vern working at repairing soffits and replacing gutters

 

 

Another thing I discovered as liaison to the heritage committee was that the City of Victoria keeps a list of craftspeople it deems qualified to work on heritage restoration. This proved a really helpful resource, as it led me to seasoned master carpenter David Helland. David not only visited our house to directly assess its needs, but also brought a photo album of his previous heritage work. This in turn allowed me to actually review his work in the field, which reassured me about his abilities. When the time finally came to tackle the exterior of the bungalow, David had the ability to precisely manufacture any wooden component required for restoration, from the elegant drop siding to the projecting water table. This afforded me confidence that he could bring off the process off to a high standard, which he very capably did!

 

 

 

Six gable tips and the runs of guttering near them all needed intervention

Replacing 'like' with 'like': quality restoration work

 

 

 

Of course, there are skills other than joinery that go into the mix for certain specialized components, like putting up a new cedar shingle roof. The natural temptation is to think that anyone who shingles can put up a cedar roof, but that’s a mistake. Also, that one grade of sawn shingle is like any other, which is absolutely not the case (like everything, there are different grades and the one needed is Perfection shingles). Again I unearthed someone seasoned in the craft with the help of the Victoria list and solicited a bid – his wasn’t the lowest by far, but opting for the low bid usually leads straight to a corner-cutting contractor and a cheap and nasty job! 

 

 

U-shaped wood guttering ready for placement

Difficult worksite, a drawback of picturesque siting

 

 

 

Master roofer Bill Haley brought a lifetime of experience to the project and did an ace job of overseeing the return of the roof to its original look. Bill had the presence of mind to photograph certain fine details before stripping the accumulated layers of old roofing off (there were three layers, including the original wooden shingles) giving a precise record of things like the tiny lift blocks located at the barge board tips. This proved invaluable, because when three layers of roofing masking an underlying structure are removed, such small details can easily disappear with them. Without these pictures, one might have rebuilt them without the riser blocks and lost the slightly oriental shift they impart to the Tudor look – a distinctive regional Arts-and-Crafts touch consistent with west coast bungalow design.

 

Tweaking the job: a warped barge board being coaxed into position with a clamp

 

 

 

A similar find was needed in order to deal with chimney repairs, and later with rebuilding the fireboxes (the fireplace’s inner hearth). There were a few spalling bricks (chunks of the face popping off), some inconsistent repointing and anomalous brick replacements, and as is frequently the case, earlier repairs had cost some of the chimney details, in the form of corbels that were were removed (quite likely because it's more expensive and takes more skill to step brickwork decoratively). Fortunately my second master carpenter, Vern Krahn, referred me to master mason Udo Heineman, who even at eighty years of age was able to take the chimney down to the roofline and then rebuild it to its original glory, working alone!

 

Chimney details restored after roof replacement

 

 

There are challenges particular to specific trades that at times can seem insurmountable. For example electricians, who have a tendency to rip open wall surfaces to facilitate easy rewiring of older houses. This can do significant damage to interior heritage details, without really detailed planning and careful oversight. The alternative is a person willing to take more time and develop real creativity. I was most fortunate to locate retired electrician Monty Gill, who was truly inventive at pulling wires without damaging walls, but this it turns out is a rarity.

 

 

Good restoration protects original details, or duplicates them precisely

 

 

 

I could go on and on about the process and skills that go into good restoration work. The point, however, is that it’s not anything like regular construction, or renovating a house where conserving the original look, footprint and floor plan don’t figure into the equation. Bungalows (and heritage homes of all eras) require a much more discerning approach based on applying the right skills, along with quality materials (old growth fir) and a lot of care and patience in execution. And a worthy outcome requires really good communication as the project advances.

As Canadian architectural critic Witold Rybczynksi says, every building speaks a distinct language, so those who work on it need to master that language in order that what they repair be fully consistent with it. To do that effectively, they have to be able to read the original language. This is also the discipline in which careful work roots any innovation extending the original structure.

Here are some simple rules that increase the likelihood of attaining compatible results:  Resist the temptation to do it all at once, as desirable as that outcome may appear. Hurrying to get it all done at once leads to mistakes you’ll later regret, and to less than optimal outcomes. Biting off more than you can chew deprives you of the advantage of 'the learning effect', which leads directly to mental indigestion. So learn from each step along the way, because you’ll nearly always see things you missed afterwards, and that will affect how you approach whatever job you tackle next. Find that heritage list of skilled artisans and review the actual working record of the names on it; try to pick someone who cares about heritage, and understands that your building’s restoration matters to you and to the broader community.

Read about successful projects and look at any you have access to. Study the details of your own place and document them with photographs (just like Bill Haley did). Recognize that the homeowner is in fact the general contractor, and that a general contractor oversees the entire process and assures that each step happens in the proper sequence. There is much to be gained from choices that are made in the course of the job - so if you aren't around for them, they'll be made by other people and the results may not be optimal. Put more positively, if you stay with the job as it progresses, you'll get to shape it while it's in motion. If you aren't paying attention to it, you need to have a great deal of confidence in the person who is!


My experience over the past twenty-five years has been an excellent one. Though some may have marvelled at my ability to tolerate an incomplete state of affairs, the waiting and delay have more often than not led to better outcomes, as projects are more thoughtfully worked through in advance of execution. Patience is certainly an important ingredient. Openness to learning is another. This is a big step for people who are not raised to be skilled, or even competent, in working with wood and other housing materials. It involves recovery of a relationship to building and the culture of building, and along the way, if we remain open to growth and a journey, we may surprise ourselves with the quality of work we can achieve. 

 

It pays any owner of a heritage asset to see himself as the general contractor on the job. This means developing a thorough knowledge of the work involved in doing anything, including ensuring that one has retained the right skills to bring the job to completion. I didn't realize at the time I first commissioned work on a heritage house - although I certainly do now - that this is a textbook instance of what in management literature is known as the 'principal-agent problem'. This problem occurs whenever a party contracts with an agent to carry out work on their behalf, and that agent responds to incentives that are not in the best interests of the contracting party. That's why it's so important to develop a concrete idea of the works needing doing, how they should be brought off, and why the heritage list of skilled trades is such an important resource. Armed with these tools, nothing stops you from getting work done to the highest standard, even if you aren't particularly handy yourself!

Books For Looks

Restoring Your Historic House, by Scott T. Hanson, available online

A Printed Frieze By British Illustrator Lawson Wood

 

My first encounter with artist Lawson Wood came unexpectedly when I discovered that a piece of his handiwork was affixed to my living room walls. It was spring 1988, I had just bought a 1913 'character home' that would turn out to be a bungalow, and I was still canvassing its unique details when I happened to notice that the frieze in the living room was actually signed 'Lawson Wood. 1921'. It’s not uncommon for bungalows to sport a frieze panel of some sort in the living room (a frieze is a horizontal band carrying a unique surface treatment, often a distinctive wallpaper or a textured surface) but it is less usual for it to be signed artwork.

 

I had assumed that the series of agrarian scenes adorning my new living room was a print of some sort, an eye-catching copy perhaps of an original illustration. Charming and unusual depictions of people and animals at work on farmsteads ran half way around the room just beneath the beamed ceiling, punctuated into distinct panels by windows and bays rising high in the walls. It was while perusing a pastoral scene of sheep grazing near an old-fashioned windmill that I came upon the distinctive signature block shown above, making the frieze - like the house itself - potentially one of a kind.

 

 

The frieze band, though occupying only a thin strip in a room endowed with numerous wooden features, caught my eye the moment I entered it. I happened to be among a crowd of prospective buyers at a realtor's open house, all of us busily tallying the place's assets and liabilities according to our various priorities. The frieze's unusual colour scheme and variety of farm scenes added to the uniqueness of a room whose complex character was one of the reasons I would find myself making an offer to purchase later that afternoon. Habituated to modern rooms with unadorned walls and unrelieved volumes, I found one so loaded with wooden wainscotting, beamed ceilings and a colourful frieze to be irresistibly atmospheric.

 

 

The friezes decorating bungalow living rooms tend to be horizontal bands of printed wallpaper with some sort of repeating pattern. This in turn is framed by a wooden rail or ledge, so it feels built into the room's woodwork. Friezes were in use prior to the bungalow era (which ran from roughly 1905 - 25) but those in bungalows tend towards motifs that are typically more spare than their Victorian precursors. Some bungalow friezes are simply comprised of textured materials, like grass matting or even burlap, applied directly to a backing panel. These decorative touches hark back to the bungalow's early use as a lodge or cottage-like structure in remote locations.

 

Wallpaper friezes serve to soften the extensive but decoratively chaste use of wood characteristic in the principal rooms of bungalows (almost as if the walls were being treated like furniture, a la Gustav Stickley). Less often, a frieze will come with an element of original work, like hand-stencilling, but only rarely is one a continuous, non-repeating illustration. I couldn't help but wonder how the art had come to be on these walls, apparently fitted to the size of the room? Could it have been developed as an actual mural on site, I wondered early on? But that was an idea that did not stand up to closer scrutiny.

 

 

Discovery of the stylized signature block piqued my curiosity about Lawson Wood as an artist (I had never heard of him prior) so I visited the library to see what could be unearthed. I didn't learn much except that he had enjoyed great commercial success as a caricaturist, in England and in North America, in the first half of the twentieth century. This didn't explain a lot to me because my frieze certainly wasn't caricature per se, more like stylized illustration. Years later, with the advent of the Internet, and then the Google search engine, a good deal more emerged about Lawson Wood, who turned out to be a third generation artist who worked as an illustrator in many media, from magazines to commercial posters and even postcards. And, he was amazingly prolific.

 

.

The very first images to surface were of a popular, well-drawn (but to me, disappointingly silly) series of cartoons featuring monkeys, one in particular called Gran'pop (see above) that Wood’s British audience apparently found highly amusing. Gran'pop subsequently became wildly popular in America too. Next there were samples of covers he executed for Colliers (a successful mass circulation American magazine for four decades, with four million readers at its height) illustrations of striking quality, often involving animals, but mostly without monkey-humour. Since then, more of the sophisticated side of his output has come to light, again often featuring animals as subject matter.

 

 

 

 

But it was a conversation with Victoria artist Rosemary James Cross, daughter of famous architect Percy Leonard James, that first lodged the thought that Lawson Wood may also have illustrated children’s story books. Rosemary knew the Savage bungalow well from her youth, having attended many social functions there with her father and her uncle, Douglas James, both of them friends and colleagues of architect Hubert Savage. She recalled her fascination as a child with the frieze, whose figures she characterized as being "like something from a child’s story book". This conjecture turned out to be a great clue to the varied talents and interests of its creator. While the frieze's scenes idealize a settled agrarian way of life evoking adult nostalgia for a disappearing past, the colours and styling of the farmers and animals reaches back to a tradition dating to the era of classic storybook illustration (cf. Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway, circa 1890s). 

 

 

 

The colourful illustrated strips of paper gracing the living room walls have only been seen by those who have lived here, and their guests, over the course of nearly a century now. So these pictures of the frieze likely represent the first publication of their details as found today. I think you will agree these farm scenes are absolutely delightful vignettes, conveying remarkable detail through their simplified patches of distinct colours. Seeing them in situ is best, but unless one happens upon them at a moment when sunlight fills the room with the full force of indirect light, the whole tableau tends to be taken in at a glance and the details remain elusive. Placed so as not to have light fall directly upon them, many of the panels are semi-obscured due to the light-draining qualities of the room’s darkened walls, perhaps especially at night.

 

 

As to the illustration's contents: all the scenes depicted here have to do with farm chores and operations that are evidently set in the British, rather than in the British Columbia, countryside. They appear to embody a kind of steady cooperation between animals and humans  more typical of husbandry in the pre-industrial era of mixed farming, from before the advent of specialization and 'production agriculture'. Figures, animals and scenery are presented in a manner that is rather quaint, but not whimsical (which quality often prevails in Wood's cartoons).

 

 

 

To a North American, the farmers depicted appear rather formally dressed for the exertive nature of their work (which remained the way in traditional English farming long after 1921). But what jumps to my eye is Wood’s profound sympathy for the farm animals, who are depicted with dignity and purpose (his control of animal proportions and movements is quite remarkable!). They are lifelike, well-cared-for and above all possessed of a trusting innocence that relates to a distinct form of husbandry, all of which is modelled through Wood's simplified technique of rendering colours in patches and blocks. Had I possessed more knowledge of art technique, I would have grasped that this implied they were designed as prints to be drawn from a master engraving.

 

"To draw animals you must sympathize with them; you must know what it feels like to be an animal." Philip Webb, Arts and Crafts architect

 

 

 

Motive power on this farmstead is supplied by the massive Clydesdale-like horses relied on prior to the advent of tractors, an era that persisted well into the twentieth century in England. At the time these rural scenes were depicted, farming in North America was already far more mechanized (having deployed steam-tractors to break the land, it was now beginning the move into gas-powered tractors) and well on its way to becoming truly industrial in nature. (Mass manufacturer Henry Ford introduced the wildly popular Fordson gas-powered tractor in 1917).

 

 

The date on these illustrations (1921) also places the work just three years after a European war that saw the advent of fully mechanized slaughter, involving horrific carnage of lives to little tactical purpose. The war also enveloped the cavalry steeds and the army of dray horses used to lug materiel around the battlefields. As an enlisted man, Lawson Wood would have seen these horrifying scenes firsthand (he served as a spotter and was decorated by the French for valour shown at Vimy Ridge) and with his manifest sympathy for animals, must have been sorely affected by the cruelty inflicted on helpless working horses by such intense, pointless warfare.

 

 

However his sympathy for animals originated, Wood held a lifetime interest in the plight of domesticated animals and was sensitive to their potential suffering at the hands of humans. Obviously he was keenly interested in them as subjects too, and as the lifelike images in the frieze attest, he must have spent a lot of time closely observing their ways. While the array of colours sported by his dray horses, steers or even his chickens is fanciful, his renderings of other creatures, like crows and sheep, are depicted more sparely and even abstractly in simple black and buff tones. 

 

 

 

So how did this decidedly British country scenery come to grace a bungalow wall on southern Vancouver Island? My original surmise was that it was commissioned for the house, likely because artist and architect knew each other, perhaps as friends from Savage's upbringing in London. This may have been no more than speculative thinking on my part, but the arrangement did appear to my naive eye to have been commissioned for the locale. I even wondered whether Wood may have visited the house after the war, and seen the room for himself before defining the work, but I have since come to realize that almost certainly Savage framed some pre-existing frieze panels to fit the space available. I have recently confirmed that the individual panels were cut from larger, continuous strips, having been shown an original print of the threshing scene (second photo, at the top) that in fact is far wider! And so I can confirm that Wood must have run a copy of work he had already designed, colouring it to serve as a frieze expressly for the Savage bungalow.

 

 

I’ve found little recorded about Lawson Wood’s actual history with animal welfare, but it was apparently extensive. A current Wikipedia article reports that he eventually “established his own sanctuary for aging animals,” and that in 1934 he was “awarded a fellowship of the Royal Zoological Society for his work with animals and his concerns with their welfare”. 

 

 

Animal sympathies notwithstanding, Lawson Wood obviously wasn’t against commercializing their images for humour in order to make a living. He’s known to have done very well from his popular monkey series, going so far as merchandising a line of wooden children’s toys known as the Lawson Woodies! There was even a contract to turn some of this into a Hollywood film production, but that was nipped in the bud by the advent of World War II. Yet despite his commercial success with comedic art, Wood remained a serious artist-illustrator whose brilliance shone through perhaps especially in his print illustrations, including many delightful pieces for children’s fairy tales and stories.

 

Today Lawson Wood is enjoying something of a renaissance among the international community of illustrators. His work spans the period from the Gilded Age right up to the advent of the Cold War, and even illustrators working in domains he may have found foreign are inspired by his creative technique and sheer mastery of drawing and illustration. Sadly, the lion's share of images in circulation today still involve the monkey cartoons, which are nonetheless very well drawn.

 

The Savage frieze clearly romanticizes a human-animal partnership characteristic of an earlier phase of the British agricultural landscape. It depicts it as purposefully arranged, mechanized but not motorized, and decidedly not industrial in scale or technology. Animals retain a real dignity even if their ultimate raison d'etre is to provide or become food. In this sense the frieze’s contents fit well with bungalow (and Progressive) era themes, harking back to earlier, simpler times  that manifested a better balance between the human and natural realms. This was a disappearing reality at the dawn of mass production in fast-growing urban settings across North America. There is a certain irony in its appearance on a wall in a suburban home, itself a reaction against the rapid massing and mixing of peoples of all types in the emerging urban realm.

 

 

Modelling an ideal of agrarian balance is perhaps intended to serve as a star by which to steer the little ship of family, as well as a way of capturing some of the innocent delight that accompanies the best of children's storybook illustration. I take the message to be one of enduring respect for agrarian and pastoral endeavour, idealized here as mutually beneficial cooperation between man and animal in a world where animals are treated with respect and enjoy their own place. People and animals working alongside each other, in purposeful, caring relations. As we now know in a world of poultry batteries and CAFOs, this was not to be the case for much longer.

 

 

Having an artful representation as permanent décor brings some unique challenges as regards conservation. There is some damage to a couple of the panels, one context piece above a doorway seeming not to be part of the original work (or to have been rather crudely added) and there’s the unavoidable buildup of grime from a century of use that included a smoky fireplace (and some unknown incidence of tobacco smoke). I foresee a paper conservator being invited to recommend actions at some point in the future. There’s also the thorny question of lighting the panels for better viewing – whether and how to do it effectively but unobtrusively, so that their content can be better enjoyed when the room is in social use.

 

 

As I've noted before in previous posts, stewardship of an older building is a long road and the tasks are many and challenging. I'm approaching the point where maintenance and repair of the frieze is creeping onto my agenda, if I can actually source the appropriate skills. Sourcing the right skill set, perhaps the biggest challenge facing owners of heritage homes who value authenticity, forms the basis of my next post.

 

 

For additional information about Lawson Wood, visit these sites:

http://www.bpib.com/illustra2/lwood.htm

http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/guide/draw-me-a-story-story-time-at-the-frick-center/

If you would like to get in touch with me, I'm at cubbs@telus.net