Restoration Stories: Patina and Paint in Old London Houses

- Blurb -

The soft shine of wooden boards, worn and gappy. Sunlight shafting through an open door out to an unevenly flagged yard where a clay pipe might turn up alongside a Thames oyster shell or a pottery shard. Blue-and-and white export ware; the molten luster of mahogany or worn silver; the curiosity of tricorn hat boxes or a fragment of Spitalfields silk; portraits whose owners might once have lived here. Would they have believed that these houses would stand 250 years later? Time has imbued all these things with unforgettable patina--not only in museums, but even more in old Georgian houses still lived in and loved, repaired, and regenerated. Like pearls, warmed to luster by the daily caress of a hand or foot. The majority of these extraordinary dwellings began as ordinary terrace houses, built to a pattern, often in pairs or small groups. Clusters exist in the East End of London: in Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Shadwell, Mile End. They are mostly Grade II-listed, and their owners put up with the bone-curdling cold of winter howling through gaps, with mending and color-matching, patching and piecing. Not just put up with--they embrace it. And among them are some unrepentantly furnished with 20th- and 21st-century modern, finding poetic harmony across the centuries.