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SEE WORTHY

The renovation of a dilapidated antique Cape marries cutting-edge
technology and old-fashioned ingenuity.

Architecture by Sam Streibert and Mark Williams
Construction by Minglewood Homes
Text by Nancy Barr
Color photography by Sarah Musumeci

When Tracy and Dan Foley first saw their Chatham summer home, it was just one big shell of old timbers divided by two floors and two-by-fours. But scattered throughout were the well-preserved remnants of the traditional Cape Cod home’s long history: three fireplaces and their historic surrounds, stately interior columns and wainscoting, period hardware and hand-hewn, 19th-century timber supporting the post and beam structure, built circa 1838.

“I feel like we could see this house as the amazing place it is now from the moment we walked in,” Tracy Foley recalls of the historic home set prominently along the well-traveled shore route between downtown and the lighthouse overlook in Chatham’s picturesque Old Village neighborhood. “It was completely gutted, but we fell in love with all the old architecture that was still here – the old wood cupboards beside the kitchen fireplace, the wainscoting, the columns – and also with what was salvaged, like the old soapstone sink that was sitting on the floor of a downstairs bedroom. I knew we were going to buy the house when my husband said, ‘We have got to put that sink back in.’”

And they did: the black soapstone double sink now takes pride of place in the airy, open-plan kitchen, whose gleaming stainless-steel appliances create a pleasing counterpoint to the old wood cabinetry and other historic features carefully preserved during the year-long renovation and modernization. Under the meticulous guidance of Chatham contractor Tim Smith and project manager Michael Buckley, this early 19th-century home blends the very old and very new, a showcase of how history and livability can be successfully combined with the help of both cutting-edge technology and good old-fashioned ingenuity.

“The kitchen is still the heart of our home, really the same way it was originally – except that now we have things like a mini fridge,” Foley said. “We still have these built-in cupboards and mantels with the amazing patina that shows they have been here for over 150 years, and at the same time I have a brand-new stove. It’s so exciting to have an old house with new comforts.”

Another clever touch in the kitchen is the sliding pantry cabinet that hides the door at the top of the basement stairway. “We were not happy when we realized that the door to the basement was right in the middle of the kitchen,” said Foley. “But structurally that’s where it needed to be.” The narrow floor-to-ceiling double cabinet, crafted by cabinetmaker Mark Massoni and installed on an inconspicuous metal track, solved the problem. It provides useful kitchen storage and hides the door, but slides easily out of the way when necessary.

The house was built about 1838 by David Gould Jr., a mariner and member of a well-established Chatham family, who owned a considerable amount of property in this Old Village neighborhood. After Gould’s death in 1889 (he was killed instantly when struck by cordage of rope falling from a team of horses), the property remained in the Gould family until shortly after the turn of the 20th century.

By the 1920s, when it was almost 100 years old, Gould’s weathered shingle residence had been converted to a boarding house, known as the Nautilus, to lodge Chatham’s growing influx of summer visitors. Later descendants used the property as a summer residence. But by the end of the last century, the house had been virtually abandoned for more than two decades, unoccupied and neglected by a scattered group of heirs whose homes were far away.

In 2003, Chatham’s Minglewood Homes was enlisted to bring the house back from its sad state. Tim Smith, Minglewood’s owner, had tackled several successful historic home remodels in Chatham’s Old Village, so he knew what he was getting into. “It takes a bit of practice to do this kind of project,” says Smith, who also does new construction. “You really have to be flexible because there is a whole set of limitations and unknowns when you’re working with the old stuff. It can be a real challenge, but I love it.”

Because the Old Village is a National Register Historic District, the project required review by the local historical commission, who readily endorsed the rehabilitation of the exceedingly dilapidated house. The commission also had few problems with the renovation plans, which called for lifting the old house and installing a new full foundation – considered crucial to a structure’s long-term preservation – followed by modernization of the interiors and systems, while preserving the look of the exterior façade, as much of the historic materials as possible and many important interior features.

Although the initial outward appearance of the old house was a sorry sight, Smith was heartened by what he found on close inspection. “Everything was pretty straight and the sills were in relatively decent shape,” he explains. “Also, the house was sitting on an 18-inch brick foundation with a crawl space, so it wasn’t sitting on the dirt, which saved it some problems.” There was also an old round root cellar in the back, but that was one of the few very historic features that was not salvageable.

Despite the home’s remodeling promise, a few months into the project, it became too much for the heirs who owned it to continue from afar. That’s when the Foleys walked in, fell in love, bought the place, and the project really got under way.

“Our goal was to keep it open, clean and new feeling while also retaining the history of it,” says Foley. “For us, what was important was to be able to save as much as we could from the original house, but at the same time we needed to have a summer home that would work with three children and two dogs. We needed things like new appliances and a TV.”

When modern amenities didn’t seem to fit in with the historic features, they were hidden, such as the wide-screen TV disguised by artwork in the family room (see sidebar). A sophisticated sound system brings music to every room, even outside to the back deck, but you’d never notice the speakers or wiring carefully recessed into the walls and tucked into columns. (The stereo components themselves, operated by remote control and keypads, take up a floor-to-ceiling section of the newly poured full basement.)
“Our project manager, Mike Buckley, really understood what we wanted this to be,” says Foley, recalling that Buckley salvaged a small tin “Bathroom” sign, probably from the home’s boarding house days, and then installed it on the door to one of the new bathrooms at the end of the remodel. He didn’t ask, she says. “He just knew that we would like it.”

As owners, they were also dedicated, she says, to making sure that “if there was anything to be salvaged – old wood, whatever – definitely, do it. And if you have to take it out but can put it back somewhere else, do that.” Thus, the contractors went to great lengths to preserve the home’s original post-and-beam construction, along with as much of the historic building materials as possible. Many original interior features spanning the home’s history – from 19th-century carpentry to early 20th-century columns – were also salvaged and carefully blended with new fittings. Throughout the 2,577-square-foot house, original rafters were left in place, and sometimes decoratively exposed, even though new wood was added to meet modern code and other structural requirements.

Even inside the new basement, amid the forest of lolly columns, high-efficiency heating system, stereo equipment and children’s toys, the history here remains tangible: several old ship’s mast beams, with their worn rings and markings from ropes, rigging, block and tackle – used in the original framing – have been painstakingly preserved and left exposed amid the substructure of the first floor.

When the old wood couldn’t be saved in place within the structure, it was reused as decoration. For instance, very old wood-pegged beams salvaged from another part of the historic structure decorate the peak of the ceiling in the back first-floor bedroom. This small rough-hewn rear ell was formerly an unfinished outbuilding used to store rakes, shovels and other tools. “I thought we were going to lose this portion of the structure when we jacked up the house to pour the foundation, but we managed to save it,” notes Smith. “The exterior sheathing is all original and we just reframed the inside to make a room where there used to be a shed.”

The upstairs was entirely reconfigured, while preserving the original “good morning” staircase, to take better advantage of the space and provide modernized bathrooms and systems. In the early 1900s, to accommodate lodgers, full shed dormers were added to both roof slopes, creating enough space to cram in six bedrooms upstairs and a few tiny water closets. The renovated space still boasts four bedrooms and two bathrooms, as well as space for the central heating/air-conditioning system. A second old staircase at the back of the house was partially reconfigured so that the head room and width complied with modern building code. But because the staircase was considered one of the home’s character-defining interior features, the building inspector provided some lenience, allowing the historically steep and narrow rise and run of the treads to remain unchanged.

“We used every space you could,” says Smith, pointing out several examples: the narrow column of master bedroom drawers built into the rafter space created by the gable roof, the cabinet hiding the heating system in the walk-in closet and the tiny sitting area tucked into the narrow space in the upstairs hall between the historic good-morning staircase and the front dormer windows. In addition, tray ceilings were created in each of the four upstairs bedrooms, making the spaces feel larger and also offering the opportunity to expose original rafters on the exterior walls.

The awkwardly shaped front entry porch presented a design challenge. It needed to be more useful but still appropriate historically. The deep but narrow porch, supported on broad Tuscan columns, was added to the front of the house about a century ago, providing shelter for lodgers arriving in the rain. But there was no space to sit and enjoy the sea just across the street. Even though the design of the old porch was an incongruous addition on the front façade, muddling the structure’s clean Cape lines, it had become part of its architectural history. So, with input from the Chatham Historical Commission, a new porch was designed to reflect the lines and defining characteristics of the old porch – such as columns and the pitch of the center pediment in the porch’s gable roof – while also providing an expanded, more useful space.

“Tearing the house apart was nothing,” says Smith. “The big unforeseen on this kind of project is putting it back together so that everything works – so that it meets all the regulations, structural requirements and needs of the homeowners, but also so that you don’t lose the most important features of the old house and so the old blends well with the new. That’s where it becomes challenging and time-consuming. Really, every day is a crisis. And there’s all the special carpentry of working with the irregular shapes and different materials of the historic structure and of tying the old fittings and finishes into the new. There’s a lot to that, and that’s where the major expenditures of this kind of project come in.”
It costs at least 30 percent more to renovate an old house than to build new, Smith estimates. Yet, he adds, “when you build new, there is no old stuff to reuse, and no matter what you do, the outcome is just different. You can never recreate the same feeling you get from using old wood.”

Neither can you reproduce the satisfaction of finishing a successful historic house remodel such as this. “We took this old Nautilus house, that I used to walk by growing up, and it was this abandoned, falling-down fox den, and brought it back to what it was,” says Smith. “Outside, it’s true to the original, to its history, and inside it’s really something special.”

The feeling is mutual for the owners. “To whoever built this house in 1838, thank you very much,” says Foley. “For some people, it’s not important to have old doors with original knobs or historic beams. But for us it was. And now it’s a beautiful place to live.”


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