My wife and I completed our renovation of a 1904 gardener's cottage in Lenox, MA, about two years ago, acting as DIY project managers to a talented but intermittently available posse of Berkshire County craftspeople. Despite its Beaux-Arts lines (the overall estate had been the work of Guy Lowell), the place as we found it resembled any small farmhouse one might see 35 minutes away in Adams. It included a porous fieldstone basement, oil-fired steam heat, sagging floors despite only 14 foot spans to the big center chimney, single-glazed double-hung windows in completely uninsulated balloon frame exterior walls, and handsomely weathered cedar shingles (some original) of which we were able to keep about 10 per cent. (Despite loving Vincent Scully's lectures featuring Shingle Style houses, It didn't immediately dawn on me that hardly any normal Lenox homeowner has natural wood shingles.) We also gave away one of the clawfoot bathtubs, which had spent many years submerged in the adjacent stream bed and needed work. Renovation costs roughly equaled purchase price. Now under the re-insulated dormer and gable roof shapes my wife calls "icebergs," we sleep warm and soundly.
For a combination of architectural and social history with a literary perspective I strongly recommend your looking up Cornelia Brooke Gilder, co-author of
Houses of the Berkshires. While there are plenty of fancy houses and families in her writings, she is a Tyringham native with a good sense of how all kinds of people live throughout Berkshire County and the surrounding region.
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Robert Miller FAIA
President
Robert L. Miller Associates
Washington DC
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Original Message:
Sent: 02-05-2020 19:40
From: Andrea Urbas
Subject: Speculative question from author wants to set in home in 1910 in NW Mass
Or consult a "historic architect," qualified per 36CFR61 Secretary of the Interior's Standards.
Original Message------
Two ideas: One, engage an architectural historian. Two, contact the Massachusetts Historical Commission for advice.
David Hart, AIA