Home Sweet Home

Visit my NEW site Alexandra Eidenschenk Designs

Many visitors to my 200 year old Cape Cod farmhouse in New Marlborough, MA have commented on how warm and inviting it is. They say my house has “good energy.” I wish I could take all the credit! Maybe a little bit has to do with my personal style (I design for a living after all) but frankly it’s the age and style of the house that speaks to people on a more cellular level. Old houses make people feel good.

Cape Cods, named after a style of houses developed on Cape Cod in the 1700’s, are basically rectangular boxes with a central chimney piercing a pitched gable roof and three fireplace openings to three main rooms on the first floor. Mine is a modification called a “story and a half” which means the first floor is built to look taller than the actual ceiling height to maximize headroom under the eaves; the second floor starts at about a foot above the first floor windows. Ceilings were low because it was expensive and time-consuming to build and in early America you would not yet have seen dormer windows built into the roof line.

To my real estate agent’s chagrin, I looked at almost 60 old houses and it was because this house had so many original elements and was relatively untouched that I bought it. Although my house has been renovated and modernized over the past two hundred years to include dormer windows on the second floor, a mudroom and kitchen attachment, and heating, electrical and plumbing systems that are fully up to code, it was always done with an eye to preserving the architectural integrity of the original structure. I got lucky with the previous owners. There’s nothing worse than an old house that has been badly renovated, and it also breaks my heart when people buy old houses and then gut them to make them look contemporary. A little modernizing is not a bad thing, but why completely change the style of the house, especially one of historical significance?

Old houses feel good because they were built with an eye toward proportion. They’re neither too big nor too small and the low ceilings give a feeling of intimacy. Open floor plan living is a major trend today but I’m convinced that rooms with old fashioned walls and doors actually make a person feel more cozy, more at home. This is particularly true in old houses where most (or all) of the rooms have individual fireplaces. It’s a primal instinct for humans to gather around a fire for warmth and community. Especially in my living room, which would have been called the “keeping room” or “hall” two hundred years ago, you can still imaging the constant hub of activity around the open cooking fire and beehive oven.

Early American houses were built using all-natural materials like wood and stone. Obviously that’s all that was available in those days! In well-preserved old houses like mine, man-made materials are rare (except for roofing, insulation, etc.) and so the house feels very organic and close to the earth. With limited free time and only rudimentary building tools, early Americans took care when adding any decorative detail or cabinetry. It’s for this reason that old houses still feel hand-made today. Like in many old houses, the vast majority of my floorboards are original and they have cracked and darkened considerably with age. No wall or horizontal trim piece is level, giving the impression that the house has settled comfortably into the earth over time.

Unlike new construction which aims for perfection and celebrates “newness,” old houses mark the passage of time and make us feel connected to the past. While I don’t believe in ghosts and have never heard any stomping around at night, I’m ever-conscious of the generations of families who have been born in this house and struggled to survive in this harsh New England climate over the past two centuries. Like any antique, my house has a provenance and it’s revealed with every bead in the woodwork, carving in the fireplace lintel and scratch in the floor. While I technically own the house, I’d rather see myself as its current caretaker. It’s an honor to live here and I’m preserving it as best I can for generations to come. How lucky am I?