LOVE AND CARRIAGE Couple teams up on back-yard rehab The Boston Globe (Boston, MA) April 13, 1995 | Robert Campbell, Globe Correspondent | Copyright
Architecture
Jennifer Payette was still a student at Harvard, studying to be an architect, when she bought this run-down carriage house in Cambridge. The carriage house was the dessert, so to speak, of a three-course meal: It came along with a triple decker Payette was buying on the same property.
"I wanted a project," Payette recalls. Apparently, being a full-time graduate student in one of the country's most demanding programs wasn't enough to occupy her attention. "I hoped to find a good investment, and I wanted some hands-on experience of construction."
For the first two years she owned it, Payette pretty much ignored the carriage house, although she always intended to renovate it. But she was too busy converting the triple decker into condos, which took a lot of time, because Payette didn't bother to hire a builder. She acted as her own general contractor.
It all reads like a novel. Somewhere along the way, a young architect named Jeff Peterson bought one of those condos. That's how Jeff and Jennifer met. In due course they got married. By then Jennifer was alreadyat work on the carriage house. The couple finished it together, feathering it as their personal nest.
The result is a real gem.
Any way you look at it -- as an artifact from Victorian times, or as a modern renovation -- this tiny back-yard building is a winner.
Viewed as history, the carriage house is an exceptionally well preserved example of the Queen Anne style of architecture, so good that its photo fills a full page of the Cambridge Historical Commission's "Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge."
It boasts one especially zesty feature: a pointed gable trimmed with wood in a sunburst pattern, a typical Queen Anne motif. From the gable juts a big ornamental bracket, which once supported a pulley for hoisting hay into the loft through a pair of second-floor barn doors.
(A quick parenthesis: Like most names in art, "Queen Anne" is confusing and essentially meaningless. It was a Victorian style that migrated to the United States in the 1880s. It got its name because somebody thought the early examples in England looked like the architecture of the reign of Queen Anne, which actually ended acentury and a half earlier.)
The carriage house may have been historic, but when Payette acquired it, it was also a mess. A nearby steakhouse used it for parking and storage. The main floor was made of concrete. The rooms were too small. There were hardly any windows. The roof was shot. There was no heat, no power, no water. Outdoors, most of the lot was paved with asphalt.
The challenge, then, was to make this little Victorian horse garage into a home for modern humans -- but to do so without spoiling its character. Payette and Peterson went to work.
They repaired the sunburst gable, then beneath it added a tiny porch that doubles as a roof for the front door. Access to the porch is through the old hayloft doorways. These now open off a new master bedroom. To gain space for the bedroom, the loft was enlarged by pushing out a wall and roof at the back of the house, where you can't see them from the street. The result is a great master bedroom, with a ceiling of folded planes as complicated and delightful as origami. Light floods through from both east and west.
You go downstairs from this bedroom by means of a space-saving spiral stair. The concrete floor has been covered with oak, built like a platform a few inches up, so as to leave enough space for under-floor heating ducts. A new chimney serves a gray Victorian marble fireplace, bought at Olde Bostonian in Dorchester. There's a bright kitchen with a Mexican tile floor and skylights overhead. The kitchen cabinets were specially designed by Payette, but they're an exception in this economical renovation. New doors and windows are stock from J. & B. Sash & Door in Cambridge, and most of the other items are equally standard. Payette guesses the whole job cost a little over $100,000.
Outdoors, in back, Payette and Peterson framed the yard with a picket fence, planted grass and clematis and wisteria, and with their own hands built a generous deck of pressure-treated Baltic fir. On the street side, they tore out an asphalt and concrete driveway and replaced it with a brick walk -- Jennifer laid the bricks herself -- lined with dogwoods, myrtle, daffodils and crocuses. They found just enough room for two inconspicuous parking spaces out near the sidewalk.
Recently, the two architects moved from the carriage house to a larger place elsewhere in Cambridge. The house was sold for $262,000 to a writer couple, who live in Colorado and come to Cambridge for three months in the fall to enjoy the foliage and the university atmosphere. For the other nine months they rent the carriage house -- a game you can play, probably, only in an academic setting like Cambridge.
Meanwhile, the latest collaboration by Jennifer and Jeff is due to arrive in May. Odds aren't bad that the newcomer, too, will become an architect. Not only Jennifer's husband, but her father, sister and two of her brothers are architects, while another brother is an industrial designer. And her brother-in-law is a builder who, at the moment, is constructing a retirement house for her parents in Florida -- a house that her father, of course, designed. Genes don't get much stronger than this.