Patrick J. Burke Creates an 18th-Century-Style Home in New Jersey

This article originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Architectural Digest.

One of his first gifts to the woman he would later marry —she was 16 or 17 at the time—was a Saratoga trunk, "metal, with a dome top," she recalls. Their romance evolved along with their growing collection of antique objects and furnishings. "We love attending antiques shows," she says. "For the two of us it's a hobby."

How better to memorialize a long and successful union than through a house that showcases this shared passion? Even its name, Weathervane Farm, refers to a beloved collection. But it doesn't stop there: Its residents also collect early American furniture, hooked rugs and folk art.

这一对had lived in this corner of northern New Jersey for decades and had raised their children there. When they wanted a new space in which to live and collect, they turned to a local architect, Patrick J. Burke, and interior designer David Guilmet, of the Solebury, Pennsylvania, firm Bell-Guilmet Associates.

Favoring Americana in their collecting lives, the couple wanted a residence to match. "They asked for classic early American," Burke says. He responded with an expansive, 18th-century-style clapboard house and a fieldstone, gambrel-roofed guest barn, which, placed just to the front of the house, "gave it a true farm feeling," Burke notes.

Together, the two buildings resemble a compound that was built up over time. The illusion of age was important to the clients, who, while desiring a new residence, also "wanted it to look period," says the wife.

They took steps to tie the buildings together "to make it a working whole," Burke says, by, for example, echoing the stone of the barn's façade in a gable end of the residence.

Entering the house is like stepping into a pool of light: A Palladian window on the second floor—copied from a house in Morristown, New Jersey, where George Washington was headquartered during the Revolutionary War—sends the sunlight down to the first floor. The entrance hall was conceived with a gallery opening on either side. "You walk in and see arches," says the wife, who had done years of research into period architecture before embarking on the project. "I really love molding and paneling," she says. "I'm crazy about depth; it's the layers upon layers that make things interesting." To the right, a gracious staircase, shallow-stepped and gracefully wide, seems to float up to the second floor.

Guilmet, who designed the interior architecture as well as several exterior details, also pored over historical plans, then replicated his findings in such elements as the house's millwork and its classic Colonial front door surround. "We were going for an authentic look," he says. "I wanted it to have a sophisticated feel." The quest extended to the nails. "People often use rosehead nails to get an old-looking floor," says Guilmet's partner, Patrick Bell, "but these floors were laid with cut nails that are flush with the wood. They're not as dramatic visually, but they're more appropriate historically."

In the spacious, light-filled living room, a Serapi carpet, from the couple's impressive rug collection, literally sets the tone; the muted crimson of its background—what the wife calls "a very Colonial red"—is picked up in upholstery fabrics and draperies. Here Guilmet opted for simplicity. "I wanted a harmonious palette with subtle changes. I wanted to keep it quiet and serene but to still give it a sense of color."

As they have for years, the couple worked with Bell, an antiques dealer, to acquire period art and furnishings for the residence. Such pursuits are in the wife's blood: "My parents collected antiques, and they took me around to dealers," she says. The couple favor painted surfaces, and some of the living room's more important pieces, including an 18th-century tea table and a pair of circa 1800 Windsor bowback chairs, with their original white paint, fall into this category.

The dining room is centered around a mahogany Federal table—a piece said to have once belonged to Benjamin Lincoln, a general in the Revolutionary War—that, along with a sideboard and six of the mahogany dining chairs, had long been in the family's possession. Guilmet had the chairs copied, increasing their number to a dozen, and claims that even he can't tell the new from the old. The twin chandeliers, redolent of 18th-century New England, are among the few other reproductions to be found.

An evocative circa 1845 portrait of Sarah North, by Sturtevant Hamblin, is one of a number of folk paintings in the residence. On the same wall, a circa 1850 banner weathervane seems to point out the window, past a pristine parterre with boxwood borders and brick walkways, by English-born landscape architect Peter Cummin, to the country-side beyond.

The house remains a work in progress—as, perhaps, any antiques lover's residence must be. "It's an evolving project to put together a collection of this caliber," Guilmet says. "You have to have people who are willing to spend time looking for the right pieces." Happily, for this couple, waiting for perfection poses no problem at all.