Preview - An Antebellum House, Held Lightly

Working on historic Southern architecture requires a kind of ethical patience I didn't fully understand until this project. The house — a pre-Civil War single in the Ansonborough neighbourhood of Charleston — had been through six owners and four renovations before it came to my clients, a historian and her sculptor husband. Parts of it had been, as the historian put it, "improved to within an inch of its life." Our work was largely corrective.

We restored the original plaster ceiling medallions. We stripped the dining room back to its Antebellum millwork and repainted everything in colours drawn from archival records of the period, adjusted slightly toward the present. The library we rebuilt almost entirely, using poplar salvaged from a demolished farmhouse in Beaufort County. The pine floors required six months of work from a specialist who drove down from Virginia.

The palette throughout is the palette of the Lowcountry itself: the grey of oyster shells, the green of marsh grass in August, the chalky white of sunbleached wood. I brought in very few new objects. What matters here is what was already there, and the light — the particular, slanted, golden-hour light of South Carolina in October, which is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

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