Chronicle of a Georgian Revived

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It had curb appeal aplenty, this circa 1930 five-bay brick-clad Georgian Revival: Set well back behind a high line of conifers and shade trees in an established neighborhood in the western environs of Boston, the house addressed the street formally and elegantly. But the minute Elissa Cullman, the designer the financier owner and his wife had hired, stepped inside the double front doors, she detected that the level of detail fell off precipitously. On the spot she proposed an architectural overlay that would bring the interior homogeneously up to what the exquisite exterior implied. What's more, she recommended the Nantucket- and Boston-based firm Botticelli Pohl, architects known for building and renovating houses with sensitive attention to historical imperatives.

They certainly had their work cut out for them. Ray Pohl, together with Cullman, shortly resolved the rabbit warren of meaningless rooms off the master bedroom on the second floor. They then appropriated unused attic space to make barrel-vaulted ceilings in the master bedroom and bath, the back hall, and a new reading alcove they created. Then, with what was left of the attic, they expanded the two existing bedrooms of the daughters of the house.

“这是still a formal house, but it no longer has the coldness that is often associated with formality."

Wisely deciding not to tamper with the classic Georgian first-floor plan (living room on the right, dining room and library on the left, and sunroom directly behind the central stair), they zeroed in on the level below. Out of the welter there they made what Cullman cunningly calls a "cheery teenage living room," complete with a computer station for each child; a mudroom (tenanted mainly by the family's two Maine coon cats); and a crafts room consecrated to school art projects (it was there that the owners' eight-year-old son recently built a replica of the White House from the most improbable raw material: an Entenmann's pound cake and red licorice slathered with white frosting for the columns).

When it came to the interior detailing, the watchwords were correction and refinement. Cullman and Pohl rescaled all the moldings and installed antique mantels; introduced slab marble floors in the entrance hall and the master bath and faux limestone in the sunroom; and replaced the dozen or so painted wood circulating doors that led into the entrance hall with doors of a punished and polished mahogany. In climax and conclusion, they had flat-panel wainscoting applied in the gracious curving stairwell from the first floor up. The owners, meanwhile, had simply (if that is the word) moved out for the duration.

Now at last Cullman was free to concentrate on the decorating, which she envisioned as being in "philosophical harmony with the architecture." The wife, who describes the house as it was then as a "blank canvas," had visited her decorator's far-flung Manhattan apartment and been impressed, if not imprinted, by the brilliant mix of English and American 18th- and 19th-century furniture, 19th- and 20th-century American art, antique Oriental rugs and decorative objects. Of the experience of shopping with Cullman for the mostly American and English period pieces that now distinguish her own house, she says admiringly, "Ellie takes your hand and guides you and at just the right moment lets go."

The wife's favorite American pieces can both be found in the luminous six-windowed living room: an inlaid mahogany tall case clock with its graceful bonnet top, and a Federal mahogany sofa with its characteristic rope-and-bow carving. The latter piece not only creates a nice silhouetted shape but also, since the two other sofas in the room are contemporary, serves to keep all that modern upholstery in check.

The English furniture also works splendidly here. A George III demilune console dispenses the sparkle of crossbanded-and-string inlay and the painted detail of tapering legs, not to mention the lightness of satinwood, to the formal, antique-red dining room. And a mahogany George III chest of drawers in the master bedroom, between the two garden-facing windows (picture acres of greensward sweeping and then falling away), is a masculine presence—call it a lowboy on testosterone—in a buttery-yellow, rather feminine room.

The house was, to revisit the wife's phrase, a "blank canvas" in terms of art as well as decoration. In fact, one of the reasons she had turned to Cullman Kravis in the first place was for its heralded expertise in American pictures. The clients' own taste ran toward 19th-century portraits, and the first painting they bought was by American Impressionist Frederick Carl Frieseke—of an enchanting turn-of-the-last-century female figure in dappled sunlight, book in hand. There are two other Friesekes on the premises: a woman in a salmon shirt reading and a Gibson-style girl holding a book. "I'm a big reader—we don't have a single television in the house—and those pictures of women reading really spoke to me," the wife explains.

"We steered them to certain galleries," Cullman adds, "and they slowly but very surely began to be drawn to more modernist works." Just witness the exuberant Calder circus scene that hangs above the sienna-marble mantel in the living room, or the Demoiselles d'Avignon-inspired Max Weber in the library, or the vibrant red Milton Avery seated woman in the entrance hall. Or in the dining room, opposite a traditional floral still life, the Walt Kuhn painting of green apples cascading out of a basket, which adds a lovely rustic touch.

When, 14 months after Cullman first proposed the "overlay" that became the overhaul, the family moved back in, and the wife says she felt as if "a wand had been waved and the house for the first time had a bloom on it and a warmth to it." Architect Ray Pohl agrees: "It's still a formal house in a formal landscape, but it no longer has the coldness that is often associated with formality. Now, from top to bottom, from end to end, it's homey as well as sophisticated. Even the hardware is seductive—luxuriously smooth to the touch—and the moldings are the sort of thing you want to reach up and hug."

Because the art is on the modern side and the palette is eclectic (there's a suffusion of ruby red from the antique Persian rug in the living room and a lambent incandescence from the canary-diamond walls of the master bedroom and the living room), Cullman herself describes this place as the essence of the comparatively lighthearted style she likes to call "young antique."

Long may that oxymoron prevail and the house grow ever older and younger.