I hate to part with these vintage cabinets which were top of the line in their day. John Rudd installed them with his son Jay (the seller) in 1967 and the Lakeville Journal profiled the renovation. (See it here.) We're selling them on ebay, with a portion of proceeds going to Habitat for Humanity. Check out the listing here if you're renovating a retro kitchen. Original Terra Cotta paint. Betty Draper would swoon.
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Catherine "Cappy" Tastapaugh, mother of Gatehouse resident Troy, grew up in the 2 BR house that Charles and Emma Rudd rented to her parents in 1938 for $30 a month. On the front porch are initials marked in cement in 1954: ICP (Irwin Charles Patchen-her dad), HDP (Helen Deneen Patchen-her mom) and CAP (Catherine Agnes Patchen-herself). She recalls that her mother used to play Scrabble with the Rudd's live-in cook Beatrice every Sunday night. By the time Helen passed away a widow in 1994, the Rudds had raised rent to just $66. Cappy left the house when she married, but her family reclaimed it when son Troy moved in with his bride in 1997. She has fond memories of the house, such as Christmas mornings pictured below. And fraught ones, too, like the time the giant tree fell across its front door. In photo above, Cappy and Troy oblige me with stories while sitting at contractor's command station set up in Holleywood's living room. In a drawer in the kitchen cabinets (which we are selling) we found an intriguing collection of memorabilia including a lapel pin, a steel tape measure, a magnifying glass encased in a leather pouch and this campaign pin from what must have been 1908. The presence of former owners is evidenced not only in writing on walls, but in initials scratched into a pane of parlor window facing the lake. "C.E.R" was the seller's grandfather, Charles Edward Rudd. But who was "M. D? R.?" Katherine Chilcoat (Town Historian) guesses they're the initials of his first cousin, Malcolm Day Rudd. Glass-etching was a popular hijinks in "96" (meaning 1896) and they were teenage boys 15 years old, and 19, respectively. We are saving bits of wallpaper from each of the rooms and will create a display chronicling historical decoration. Here, above the marble fireplace in the living room, is penciled "Painted and repapered July 1972- J.K. Rudd & Alec Kloman." Imagine wallpapering in the heat of mid-summer, without air conditioning. The seller's father was stalwart indeed. In the living room, a closet next to the fireplace will be opened to provide access to the kitchen. We arrive this weekend to discover that much progress has already been made. Walls denuded of wallpaper reveal many ghosts, such as holes for stovepipes (see white patch near ceiling), shadows of former doors and signatures of painters and wallpaperers, including that of the seller's father who did much work on the house (including carpentry and upholstery) himself. My sister and me, King of Prussia, PA, 1965. I'm on the right, with the microscope. A few level-headed friends have questioned the sanity of our adventure. Whatever possessed us, they want to know. We hope that Holleywood will prove a sound investment, but they're right to point out that the purchase of it had more to do with passion than with practicality. I love old houses. When we bought in the city, we looked only at prewar buildings. Our farmhouse in Amenia was built pre-Civil War. I suspect that my obsession with vintage real estate was sparked early on by a Colonial dollhouse that Santa brought to our modern, mid-century split-level. How I loved playing with it (in those days eleven year olds still played with dollhouses) and spent hours arranging furniture and imagining dramas in little rooms which seemed to me vast with possibilities. This appeared in a listings ad for the realtor in the local paper last week. We receive notice of it from a New York friend who I didn't realize read the Connecticut paper. It's something I've never seen before: an ad for a house that's already sold. We hope we can live up to the hype.
We find the original front doors, grand and imposing, in the recesses of the basement, next to the gravestone. The wood panels and glass windows are caked with dirt and dust, but otherwise undamaged. Even the hardware is all there, down to the little porcelain fob that covers the keyhole. (See below.) Restoring the original doors will require some surgery. We'll have to reconfigure the existing front door frame (see photo below) and recreate the shallow arch that crowns the doors in historic views of the house. (As in the drawing here.) When were the fancy double doors replaced with a single, plain one? And why? Whatever the answer, we are grateful that the magnificent originals weren't tossed. And that the basement stays dry, so as to preserve them. Kitchen demolition has begun but one thing we're leaving intact (aside from the Glenwood) is the wall-mounted bell register. A typewritten, plasticized card on the box identifies the room in which each bell rings. Unbelievably, the system still works-- at least in one room: the dining room aka "parlor." I marvel that bell service was thought necessary in bathrooms. To call for more toilet paper? |
who we areWe are a couple of Upper West Siders from NYC who never set out to buy an old mansion in Connecticut. But the moment we walked through its massive front door, we were smitten. The info on this site is earnestly cobbled from a variety of sources, including the web. Please let us know if we've gotten something wrong, or if there's a story about Holleywood you'd like to share. forewords
December 2021
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