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Sunday, July 14, 2013

The Maplehurst Hotel


 The Maplehurst Hotel, Bethlehem, NH

Guest Room at the Maplehurst
In 1876, FL Kelly Builders & Son opened the Avenue House as a boarding house in Bethlehem.    It later became the Gramercy before being renamed The Maplehurst Hotel c.1910.  Like many large 19th century hotels in New Hampshire, The Maplehurst began with a core building that grew larger with multiple additions that provided more rooms guests and entertaining space.  The Maplehurst was unusual from other hotels in the region with its gambrel roof.  
Room Hallway

The main building of the hotel had many features common of the era including a large front porch that wrapped along the font facade of the building, a lobby with a cobblestone fireplace, communal dining room, and a network of small guest rooms off of tall ceilinged hallways.  While many of the rooms at the Maplehurst had a sink on their walls, they shared communal bathrooms.  Surviving outbuildings included a laundry building, maintenance building, and an early 20th century annex that provided a large room for dances and entertainment.  

Lobby Fireplace
In 1974, the hotel was converted into a tennis camp.  The building was used for dormitories and multiple tennis courts were constructed behind the building.  John F. Kennedy Jr. supposedly attending camp here.  The building was abandoned in 1988 and suffered from neglect, disrepair, and damaging water infiltration.  

In the summer of 2012, the Maplehurst Hotel was demolished by Spears Brothers Building Wrecking in Laconia, NH for a contracted cost of $347,010.00.  Before demolition commenced, lead paint was found on the building clapboards resulting in each clapboard being removed individually to be disposed of appropriately.  The Laundry Building, Maintenance Building, and Annex were razed before demolition on the main building began.  A new public library is planned for the location.  

Maplehurst Hotel Dining Room

Communal Bathroom at the Maplehurst




Saturday, July 13, 2013


Little Harbor Chapel interior looking from the door towards the pulpit area.

Little Harbor ChapelPortsmouth, NH

The chapel from the parking lot.
Little Harbor Chapel was created by Arthur Aster Cary whose summer "cottage" (the rambling estate of Creek Farm) sits along the shore nearby.  Originally built as a Swedenborgian chapel, the building became nondenominational sometime after opening.  Arthur Cary, who was not ordained, preached in this chapel during the summer from the time it was completed in 1903 until the year before his death in 1923.   

Nestled on a rural road among a grove of tall pines, the Georgian
The chapel being used for a wedding.
Revival chapel was modeled after a c1744 chapel at Harvard University.  The building has many original details including doric and ionic order pilasters, dental moldings, original pews, and an ornate pipe organ.  Cary built the chapel for his own use and opened to the public.  Today, the chapel is run by a board of directors who put on a season of summer services as well as opening the chapel for wedding rentals to raise money to help with the building's care and maintenance.   

Detail of the pipe organ case.
Little Harbor Chapel looking from the pulpit area to the front door.  



Friday, July 12, 2013

The roadside view of the Scheier house with its current owner.  

Scheier House, Durham, NH

Designed by David Campbell 


David Campbell (1908~1963) was a Harvard trained New Hampshire architect.  Today, Campbell is known more for his work with the American Craft Council and as a founding member and director of the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen.  In his role of director of the League, Campbell was responsible for bringing many prominent artists to New Hampshire, helping them find work, and often designing them modern comfortable homes that are now part of New Hampshire's mid century modern architectural legacy.  
A view of the Scheier House showing the butterfly roof.

In 1941, ceramicists Edwin and Mary Scheier came to New Hampshire at the invitation of David Campbell to teach at UNH.  The Scheiers continued to work at UNH until 1960.  While in Durham they developed a following of collectors both locally and internationally.  This house in Durham, designed by David Campbell for the Scheiers sometime in the later 40s or early 50s, had many custom designed features for the couple including a built in studio space.  The house also has many features that are iconic of modern homes from its time.  The butterfly roof diminishes the modestly proportioned house's true size when viewed from the roadside.  The interior, which has three different levels, features a large living room with a ceiling that sweeps upward from the interior wall to meet a ribbon of tall windows that look over a pine wood.  A screen porch off the dining room provides additional space for relaxing and entertaining during the warmer weather.  


Today the Scheier's pottery is still highly valued by collectors and is considered iconic artwork from the mid-century movement.  When they retired in 1960, the Scheier's sold their house to friends who still lives in and maintains it with their family
The living room roofline of the Scheier house.  
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Thursday, July 11, 2013


The Madame Sherri Castle in Chesterfield, NH

The Madame Antoinette Sherri Castle was once the proud summer home of a once prominent costume designer from New York City.  Her summer home, nestled in the south-west corner of the Monadnock region, was reputedly home to wild parties with Madame's New York friends and connections.  Built on a hilltop, the house had a first floor of fieldstone walls with a second story balcony that projected from a gabled roof second floor.  The exaggeration of the modest sized house, which was lost to fire in the 1960s, as a "castle" may very well be due to the surviving fieldstone elements of the house including a magnificent three arched exterior stair (pictured above & below) that connected the second-floor balcony to the house's grounds below.  This feature, probably the building's most prominent and grand architectural detail, is current threatened by the unchecked failure of the two larger arches that show large gaping fault lines in the stonework.  The property is owned by the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.  




Gilly's!

According to their website, the diner (which dates to 1940) was one of only five of its kind built by the Worcester Diner Company and is currently the only one still in full operation. Before it found it's permanent home on Fleet Street in the shadow of the High/Hanover Parking Garage, Gilly's PM Lunch was a movable wagon that was pulled first by horse, then tractor (pictured here) and finally by truck.  After it was parked in place, a small addition was added along the side of the lunch cart.  Responding to health code requests, a new larger addition was added and the once still visible truck that was the last means of mobilization for Gilly's was removed.  

In spite of the recent changes, Gilly's still has interior and exterior integrity that, with its greasy hamburgers and other like foods, make stepping inside in the early hours of the morning like stepping back into the Eisenhower era...only greasier.  




Welcome!

In his 1930s book, John Mead Howells explored the iconic homes of the 17th, 18th, & early 19th centuries in the area of seacoast New Hampshire and southern Maine.  Our rich architectural heritage expands well beyond 1830s that will be explored and shared here. 

The Goldenrod candy counter, soda fountain, and lunch room have been an iconic destination at York, Maine's Short Sands Beach since it first opened in 1896.  At night, the building takes on a special character where you can watch and follow the various stages of salt water taffy production through glowing plate glass windows or look beyond the copper pots and antique machinery to the servers filling boxes of wax paper wrapped kisses or pounds of creamy fudge.  The glowing neon signs on the building welcome visitors with their cheerful color combinations of greens, reds, pinks, and oranges.  Current zoning laws do not allow for neon to be used in the area today, thankfully these fine examples of glass and gas are grandfathered and still in use.