GREAT INDOORS
Big renovations for a Little house
By Barry A. Muskat; photos by kc kratt

The appealing Vestibule opens to a large Reception Hall. Beautiful wood floors of both rooms have been restored and replicated. An arched leaded-glass window depicts an intriguing crest in its colored glass design.
For the dining room, the owners found a handsome carved oak cabinet (French circa 1900) which functions as a buffet/credenza/breakfront.
The stairwell’s newel post includes a carved sunflower motif.
The beautiful leaded glass windows at the stair landing glow with vibrant colors, including a sunflower motif echoed in the corners of the pattern.
The living room is still being restored, but a special highlight will be its gorgeous fireplace. The vividly colored tiles of the fireplace surrounds shimmer like highly polished jade jewels. At their center is the original gas heater.
The woods of the Entry and Reception Hall are particularly beautiful. Closets and storage spaces are concealed behind the carved panels.
The window treatment in the reception room picks up colors from the wallpapers. the Configuration was sketched by a Cleveland designer and crafted locally from imported fabrics purchased in Toronto.
A small room off the reception hall was recreated and is an appealing and cozy spot. The fireplace mantel is a rich charcoal marble; wallpapers are a William Morris design. Gilt sconces are French nineteenth century; the mirror is a contemporary painted piece by a Canadian artist.
What so many of us love about Buffalo’s architecture doesn’t have anything to do with big-name buildings. It relates more to the quality structures that line block after block of residential streets in a most remarkable way. With winter’s views unimpeded by foliage, pedestrians continually discover yet another house that they never knew existed, or some fascinating detail like a special bay window, a hand-crafted porch railing, or an intricate cornice. Small surprises like this are what make it so much fun to walk the neighborhood streets.

One such revelation is this Elmwood Village residence designed by Buffalo architect Henry Harrison Little. His first partnership, with Eugene Holmes, designed several mansions on North Street: their largest commission was the Fitch Accident Hospital located at Seneca and Michigan Streets. After Holmes’s death, Little opened his own firm, doing residential and commercial work in the Cobblestone District and around the city. He designed the Niagara University Medical College (on Ellicott Street) and several high schools. He also served as supervising architect for the Buffalo Post Office (now Erie Community College) and designed the distinctive Red Jacket Apartments (at the corner of Main and Allen).

For himself and his wife, the former Anna Burger, Little designed a lovely Victorian home, completed in 1891. This house is now in the process of a long and fastidious restoration by the present owners, who bought it over twenty years ago. At the time of purchase, it was still divided into two apartments that had been created seventy years earlier. Otherwise, the house appeared to be nicely maintained, and the purchasers had no concept of the devastating damage done by a fire in 1933, naively supposing that “there were just a few things that needed to be done.” They now refer to that comment as “the famous last words.”

They’d discover that the renovations that divided the house had also removed key structural walls. The owners confess, “It quickly became apparent that all the horrors had been very well concealed and the place was a wreck.” They would immediately need to rebuild the load-bearing walls before doing anything else.

Restoration/construction work started in earnest in 1987. Ceilings were removed in the basement and the third floor was gutted. Three transverse walls in the basement formed foundations for the interior supporting walls, and sagging floors were jacked up. New systems were installed for plumbing, electric, and heating.

Dramatically—for such a modest home—the first floor’s exterior walls are twelve inches of solid brick faced with a six-inch layer of stone (for a total of eighteen inches in thickness). Interior construction shows standard studs, sixteen inches on center, but also includes firing strips and sheathing on either side of the studs so that walls are comprised of six layers of materials. When a piece of sheathing was removed it revealed a large black signature on the interior wall: Little – Architect.

Reconstructing the house accurately became a real challenge. Fortunately, a complete inventory prepared in 1931 for Buffalo Surrogate Court upon Mrs. Little’s death named each original space and its contents. This information—including how many pictures hung on each wall—gave the owners tremendous insight as to the size and purpose of each room.

Now that the structural work is done and rooms have been recreated, Little’s design can be experienced as intended. As one progresses through the first floor, there’s a real feeling of discovery. Huge pocket doors slide open to reveal additional spaces. The owner notes that Little designed in sequences, narrowing each space toward a doorway and widening it into the next space. This begins immediately on the front porch, which narrows as it approaches the entry door and then again widens through the house.

A small entrance hall opens into a beautiful reception hall (as labeled in those original room inventories). In both, closets and storage rooms are concealed. Instead of doors and casement trims, hidden panels open for closet and storage areas. This device had not been used in the original plans. The owner, who spent considerable time in Europe, comments, “I always liked it in French houses—they hide the openings whenever there are paneled rooms.” Here, it keeps the spaces very elegant.

Although the woodworking is remarkable throughout, the staircase to the second floor is particularly noteworthy. A horizontal row of raised square panels stands atop the wainscoting which is actually vertical strips of alternating woods (quarter-sawn white oak and quarter-sawn sycamore). The initial impression is almost like a linenfold, but the use of the woods appears to be a unique design that Little used for his own home. The owners have sent samples of the wood to the U. S. Forest Products Testing Service for accurate identification of the species.

Victorian spindle balusters were about half intact and had to be restored, but not until a section of the stairway was removed to redirect it to a single-family layout. Probably as a result of the Great Depression as well as a fire, the property was divided into rental apartments in 1933. Ten years later the house was sold to a brother and sister. She and her family lived on the first floor; he and his family lived on the second; the third was rented to a tenant. The owners note, “It appears in those years, the families did all they could to turn the house into the model of a suburban ranch.”

Now that the home has been restored to its proper era, fascinating details stand out. An intriguing arch-topped leaded glass window in the entry hall leaves unanswered questions. The crest shows a rampant sheep, a second sheep at its bottom, and palm trees (often associated with the Crusades). “It looks like a family crest, but I doubt that it was Little’s, whose family were Yankees from Vermont,” the owner comments. Mrs. Little’s father, Reverend Otto Burger, was pastor of the largest German/Protestant congregation on Buffalo’s East Side and very active in Buffalo’s German community. The crest may relate to that heritage, but remains a topic for speculation.

The large window at the stair landing is spectacular. Skillfully restored, its many missing pieces were replaced by Larry Tschopp. The colorful pattern shows a floral motif with creeping vines and vibrant jewels of bold aqua and rose. The owner believes the design was direct from a pattern catalogue and crafted locally. Sunflowers appear in the window’s corners, a motif that repeats in the wood carvings of the newel post and in the corner blocks of the first floor’s woodwork.

A closet in the vestibule was removed. With enough materials of the original floor pattern, the rest of the floor was carefully reproduced in a coordinating design of quarter-sawn white oak with mahogany strips, appropriate to the period.

The newly crafted pocket doors are quite remarkable. They were recreated from a charred surviving fragment of an original door that was discovered in a wall opening where it had been sealed for years. Craftsman Bruce Beyer made the doors of oak frames and styles with sycamore panels. Strips of pine are glued under pressure with oak veneer. This approach provides great stability as the alternating grains add strength for these exceptionally heavy doors—a method of construction documented in Encyclopedia Britannica circa 1860.

The dining room ceiling is pressed steel, installed in the house in 1900. This is known because Mr. and Mrs. Little had the house entirely redecorated that year, moving to the Lenox Hotel for the entire period of renovation. It is speculated that the house (which was built with gas lighting) was updated for electrical installation at that time, and the opportunity was used for additional major decoration.

The original wallpaper, fragments of which were found during the reconstruction, appear to have been hand-painted, hand-embossed, and hand-gilded; these historic designs have been captured in the replacement papers. The dining room paper is Candace Wheeler’s Honeybee design, produced by J. R. Burrows. Wheeler was the first-place winner of an 1881 American art wallpaper competition. As the first important female designer, she was a leader in the American Arts & Crafts Movement, decorating the interior of the Women’s Pavilion of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition (1893).

Reception hall papers are an original Christopher Dresser pattern (by Bradbury & Bradbury), introduced at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876. The wallpapers, borders, and friezes are stunning, a tribute to the Aesthetic movement, which upheld the notion that artfully ornamented interiors were essential to fine living. The hand-printed metallic colors create a unique glow, and change according to the ambient light.

Another appealing spot in the house is the reception room, a small room off the reception hall that had to be completely recreated. A fireplace was installed, which the owners describe as “completely nonhistoric, of no particular period, and totally inauthentic.” That being said, it is a handsome charcoal marble, richly figured with segments of white, rust, and black. The cozy wall-covering is inspired by a William Morris design with a handsome coordinating frieze. The window covering was sketched by a designer in Cleveland and made of imported fabrics, braid, and tassels purchased in Toronto.

The baroque mirror hanging above the fireplace is also nonhistoric, a painted-mahogany piece by a Toronto artisan, with a pair of nineteenth century French gilt sconces, each holding five candles. On the mantle is a teak and jade Chinese mirror (circa 1920).

A painting of the Chateau de Chillon hangs in the reception room. Although not original to the house, its significance is that a similar painting was listed as one of 110 paintings in the estate inventory at the time of Mrs. Little’s death. (It is said that Mrs. Little offered to donate the collection to the Albright, a gift that was declined by the gallery.) The Swiss castle, the subject of a Lord Byron poem, was often painted by nineteenth century artists. Here it hangs in an ornate gilt frame.

The former “conservatory” is now the breakfast room and boasts an enormous south-facing window. The owners remodeled the kitchen about fifteen years ago, blending vintage elements and simple cabinetry with a granite-topped center island. The original maple floors have been preserved.

Finally at “the fun part” of their renovation, the owners are now decorating major rooms, such as the living room, which features a window group with an exceptionally large, sturdily built clear glass window and two large leaded-glass windows with square panes of clear beveled glass on either side. On sunny days, they splash bright prisms of color. Another key feature is the fireplace with its elaborately carved mantle. The surrounds are exceptionally pretty tiles that on first impression look like carved pieces of precious jade, with raised floral and geometric designs. At their center is an original gas heater (which must have been a modern amenity for the 1891 house).

Anna and Henry Little would be greatly pleased to see their home so beautifully restored and loved 120 years later.

Barry A. Muskat is Spree’s architecture critic and sits on the city of Buffalo’s Preservation Board.


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