Work has started in the butler's pantry but we can't yet bear to remove this key rack handmade by John Rudd which still holds keys to porch doors and his late wife's luggage.
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Work has started in the butler's pantry but we can't yet bear to remove this key rack handmade by John Rudd which still holds keys to porch doors and his late wife's luggage.
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 We visit Salisbury's historic Town Hall to purchase a ticket for the town transfer station (euphemism for dump.) Walking down a long hallway, we see a photo of John Krom Rudd, the last family member who lived in the house, on the wall in a gallery of town residents. In the portrait, he is standing next to the front door we are about to replace with double doors found in the basement. Those doors were original to the house, replaced by the single door (pictured) in 1915 when the house was "modernized." We will save the single door (with its brass knocker engraved with JKR) because perhaps, a century from now, our great-great-grandchildren will want it, wondering whatever had possessed us to remove it.
Mr. Rudd's caption is a lovely glimpse into turn of the (other) century Lakeville: Somewhere around 1928 we had the first sound movie in Lakeville at the Stuart Theater. I went with Mother and Dad to see (and hear) Al Jolson in “The Jazz Singer.” The movie was on conventional film but the sound wasn’t on a sound track. It was on a Victrola record that was supposed to synchronize with the movie—it didn’t.  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.
 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 1972, John Rudd (original owner's great grandson) and his wife Jinny moved into the house full time after John retired from his engineer job in New Jersey. They redecorated the house in high-70s style, which included gold and avocado color schemes. This eagle-pattern paper on a wall in the den evokes a political theme, perhaps a nod to John's forbear. Plumbing was added to the house in 1915, via pipes narrow as this one. No attempt was made to hide pipes, as you can see. They were a sign of modernity.
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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
June 2018
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