For our office holiday outing, we visited the Wharton Esherick house, the home-turned-museum of one of the country's most celebrated artist-painter-craftsmen. I would rank it a top-ten local visit (its in Paoli) by anyone who appreciates art, furniture design, or custom designed and built homes, hovels, and haunts. Its a beautifully crafted tiny little house / studio that took him 40 years to complete. He just added what he needed as he and his family needed it. They added a small bathroom after 21 years of trudging to the outhouse. They finally added a kitchen after a few decades of cooking over an open fireplace....things like that, made from what they could find around them, artfully crafted. Wharton referred to the house as an "autobiography executed in wood." We had the pleasure of taking the tour with his son in law, Bob (about 85) who knew him well and shared many personal stories. Bob was great. I got to site next to him on the now world famous cantilevered oak stair listening to him share about the life and times of this great craftsman and why he made some of the design decisions he did, slowly but surely, piece by piece.
Ive got to say it was really encouraging to me in regards to our own home renovation process, which sometimes seems never-ending, but has always gone at the pace we've set out. Im not interested in rushing things. Ideas come at me when they do......and I execute them when I do.
Here's the outside:
This is Bob, and his hat. It was 19 degrees and he was the only one not cold. What a storyteller he is.
And the famous double hand carved stair:
