Decorating The World

Historic Remake: A Tudor to Love and Labor Over – Wall Street Journal

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• 17 July, 2012
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By Constance Mitchell Ford

Several months ago, I purchased a beautiful 85-year-old Tudor revival-style house in Westchester County, a northern suburb of New York City.

In some ways, it’s the type of house I always dreamed of owning, with intricate designs, gables, diamond-shaped leaded-pane windows, timber boards that shoot up to the roof and a large chimney. My house is in Fleetwood, a section of Mount Vernon, N.Y., known for its pre-World War II vintage homes and huge Norway maple trees that shade the streets.

The house reminds me of the homes owned by nice middle-class families in old novels and black-and-white movies from the 1950s. The refined couples with the clever and well-mannered children seemed to live in Tudor homes. Oddballs and Alfred Hitchcock villains, in contrast, seemed to live in scary Victorian homes. (All of these decades later, I still associate Victorians with the movie “Psycho.”) Although both architectural styles were exported to the U.S. from Great Britain, the Tudor was far more popular and enduring.

Gary Williams, a former trustee of the Westchester County Historical Society, said most Tudors in suburban New York were built between 1890 and 1930 and were called “stock broker homes” because the original owners were often bankers and the homes indicated that the owners were affluent and conservative. “The homes were a status symbol, a symbol of being well off,” said Mr. Williams.

Tudors can be grand like the ones built by the late William Van Duzer Lawrence, who founded Sarah Lawrence Collegeand contributed to the development of Bronxville, the very wealthy town next door to Fleetwood filled with magnificent Tudors. But Tudors can also be modest and many of these are found in older suburbs all across the Northeast and Midwest.

Prior to World War II, real-estate developers began moving away from Tudors, which were considered complicated to build and closely associated with Europe. As demand for Tudors declined, Colonial revival styles became more popular. Not only were these styles easier to build, but the owners were viewed as more patriotic. “People started to look back at the founding of the republic” and wanted to “go back to our original architecture,” says Steve Tilly, an architect in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. who specializes in historic preservation.

Even today builders shy away from building Tudors, although the style remains popular with historic-home enthusiasts.

Restoring a Tudor home, however, isn’t for the faint of heart. They can be more complicated than other types of old homes to update. The same intricacies that make Tudor homes appealing, can also make them costly nuisances to repair. The roofs, which are often slate or tile, can be extraordinarily expensive to replace. The leaded-glass casement windows are beautiful, but aren’t very energy efficient and require delicate expert handling to repair and update. The exterior wooden timbers, which give Tudors their distinctive look, require expert carpentry to maintain. The interior plaster walls require the skill of more experienced contractor than your typical drywall installer. And if you need to upgrade the malfunctioning locks and hardware, forget about finding replacements at big-box home centers. More than likely, you’ll have to have them custom-made or order them online from a historic-home locksmith.

The bottom line is that turning my old Tudor house into a comfortable home will take a lot of time and money. My goal is to make the house bright, cozy and esthetically appealing, while preserving as many of the historical aspects of the house as possible. There are a few exceptions: the old bathrooms and kitchen will receive makeovers.

My goal in writing this column is to teach readers a little about historic preservation and a little about the history of design and construction in older suburban homes. Over the next several weeks, I plan to write a weekly column that chronicles my Tudor renovation.

Next Week: Plaster vs. Sheetrock

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