Anatomy of a house.(Books about antiques)(The Warner House: A Rich and Colorful History )(Book review)

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was a thriving and prosperous port on the Piscataqua River, where skilled craftsmen churned out straight and sturdy white pine masts and ships that were the envy of sailors around the world. Settled in 1630, by 1660, the region boasted more sawmills than in all of England, and the ships built in Portsmouth plied the oceans carrying back expensive cargoes that brought great wealth to their owners and the merchants who sold the imported goods. One affluent land- and ship-owner was Archibald Macpheadris, who began building one of the most imposing and elegant houses in colonial America in 1716--two years before he married Governor John Wentworth's daughter Sarah. The house, now known as the Warner House, is the subject of a recently published monograph entitled The Warner House: A Rich and Colorful History, written by a team of thirteen specialists and edited by the curator of the house, Joyce Geary Volk. Individual chapters are devoted to the history of the house, its architecture, the archaeology conducted on the site, and highlights of the collections (furniture, paintings, prints, jewelry, costumes, textiles, books, ceramics, and glass).

The Warner House boasts many innovative architectural features. Macpheadris came to Portsmouth from Ireland by way of Boston, where he met one John Drew, a ship's joiner recently arrived from London who dabbled in designing buildings, for architecture was not a stand-alone profession at this early date. Drew's interest in expanding his knowledge of the principles of architecture is confirmed through his surviving memorandum book for the years 1707 to 1722, which relates that he was familiar with a recently published English translation of Andrea Palladio's First Book of Architecture. It is possible that the Warner House, which Drew designed and built, is the "earliest documentary proof in the U. S. of the presence and actual use of Palladio," although Richard M. Candee and John B. Wastrom, the authors of the pertinent chapter in the book do not tell us what exactly Drew might have appropriated for the Warner House from Palladio's great treatise.

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The house is also one of a handful to have what is known as a "floating floor," referring to the fact that each board is joined to the next solely with dowels. Some of the doors are hinged so that they move up as the door is opened in order to clear the carpeting--surely a feature we would welcome in our houses today. Colorful murals of both identifiable and undecipherable subjects, executed between 1718 and 1720, possibly by Nehemiah Partridge, are "the earliest extant Anglo-American wall paintings." The parlor chamber has walls painted with smalt, or tiny glass particles embedded in the paint, which has recently been re-created to beautiful effect

The house is named for the ship-owner and merchant Jonathan Warner, who married ...