Collecting Houses is a story about houses their cellars, attics, and everything in between. It's about houses the author has moved, dismantled, reclaimed, recorded. It's about houses Baker found hidden in the woods, houses she rescued from ignorance, greed or bureaucracy, and houses she discovered masquerading behind all sorts of disguises. It's about how a house feels to be, abandoned, condemned, moved, tinkered with, ripped apart, modernized, put on The National Registry or sent to Alaska. These are not just any houses, but very old ones, old for this country anyway. Not that Baker feels that our later houses aren´t interesting, but what she loves the most is the freshness of the very beginning: the distinctive, intangible quality that surrounds 17th and early 18th century houses. And that´s where she became rooted. Rooted in the adventure, the thrill of discovery and the tantalizing mysteries that reside behind the walls of our early American structures. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, always instructive, Collecting Houses teaches the reader how to know an old house, how to hear its voice, how to understand its language, recognize its personalities and take care of its needs. In writing this book Baker has drawn upon 50 years experience with more than 200 antique structures in Rhode Island, southern Massachusetts and eastern Connecticut. As a restoration contractor, building archeologist, and consultant she has worked with building owners, agencies, architectural historians and State Historical Commissions. Included in this 232-page book are 77 graphics, an appendix, a glossary of building terms, and a bibliography. Collecting Houses will appeal to historians, architects, archeologists, carpenters, builders, restorers and preservationists. It will also delight anyone who wants to understand an old house or who enjoys reading about somebody else´s passion. Baker lives in Westport, Massachusetts. Book Reviews Anne Baker´s magnificent memoir tells of an intense love: it chronicles her growing passion for old houses and for the stories they can tell--if one listens to them, touches them. Baker trespasses to get close to houses; she buys honey from their owners if only to cajole them not to burn their seventeenth century paneling as firewood. She feverishly documents houses as they are about to vanish. She moves them, from New England to Alaska, if necessary. She moves about New England, never lonely, as a cloud of plaster-dust, and skin-scrapes. As this love affair began, her first, long-suffering, husband, and father of her first five children, grumbled: "Those are not the hands of a wife." But Baker was lost already, in keenly reimagining how generation upon generation of artisans worked their traditions, and adapted their styles to weather, colder than the West of England, or Wales, where the first New England carpenters came from. Baker´s memoir is not only a love story but an extraordinarily clear and beautiful account of the essentials of early New England architecture. Grace Dane Mazur, author of Trespass We Americans are reckless with our past. What we should preserve we discard. What we should protect we destroy. What we should remember we forget. In this marvelous account of her life´s work as a rescuer of early colonial structures in Southeastern Massachusetts and coastal Rhode Island, Anne W. Baker takes the measure of our losses--and celebrates those rare instances when a threatened treasure is saved for future generations. Her book is outspoken, sometimes hilarious, too often heartbreaking, and always instructive and entertaining. It is history at its liveliest and best. Llewellyn Howland III, bookseller and historian.

A landmark book by the country's foremost authority on antique dollhouses and their furnishings. Written in delightful prose with wonderful anecdotes and valuable descriptions, this work will become a standard reference for collectors and novice enthusiasts alike.

Epilogue: Charleston, 1832 -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Index

A beautiful collection of collage art and techniques exploring the theme of home In This House showcases a collaborative art project that explores innovative altered art and collage techniques by top mixed media artists. Using the theme of "home," each artist designed five altered art rooms to complete an individual 9"x12" 'house' that closes like a book or can stand accordion style. Each house is a part of a larger whole; a neighborhood of twelve unique and fascinating art-full houses, varying in execution, theme, and style, yet united as part of the larger neighborhood. Each "house" is a unique interpretation on the theme, reflecting the artist's style and incorporating the mixed media techniques for which each artist is most well known. The thirteen artists have created an inspiring collage technique workbook for readers. The back of the book includes a blank "house" template and a clip-art gallery of home-themed imagery that readers can alter and use in their own collage work.

Houses for all Regions: CRAN Residential Collection is the first in a series on international residential architecture produced by The IMAGES Publishing Group in partnership with the American Institute of Architects (AIA). The projects are divided into four climate zones: arid/semi-arid, temperate, arctic/cold-climate and tropical/sub-tropical, and each illustrates how architects adapt their designs to accommodate the challenges posed by the local topography and variations in climate. Containing cutting-edge residential designs by leading architects from across the world, including North America, the Caribbean, Asia and Europe, and featuring rarely seen images, Houses for all Regions: CRAN Residential Collection underlines the sensitivity of today’s architects to the natural environment, as well as the care and attention paid to interior design and everyday living.

Historic House Museums in the United States and the United Kingdom: A History addresses the phenomenon of historic houses as a distinct species of museum. Everyone understands the special nature of an art museum, a national museum, or a science museum, but “house museum” nearly always requires clarification. In the United States the term is almost synonymous with historic preservation; in the United Kingdom, it is simply unfamiliar, the very idea being conflated with stately homes and the National Trust. By analyzing the motivation of the founders, and subsequent keepers, of house museums, Linda Young identifies a typology that casts light on what house museums were intended to represent and their significance (or lack thereof) today. This book examines: • heroes’ houses: once inhabited by great persons (e.g., Shakespeare’s birthplace, Washington’s Mount Vernon); • artwork houses: national identity as specially visible in house design, style, and technique (e.g., Frank Lloyd Wright houses, Modernist houses); • collectors’ houses: a microcosm of collecting in situ domesticu, subsequently presented to the nation as the exemplars of taste (e.g., Sir John Soane’s Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum); • English country houses: the palaces of the aristocracy, maintained thanks to primogeniture but threatened with redundancy and rescued as museums to be touted as the peak of English national culture; English country houses: the palaces of the aristocracy, maintained for centuries thanks to primogeniture but threatened by redundancy and strangely rescued as museums, now touted as the peak of English national culture; • Everyman/woman’s social history houses: the modern, demotic response to elite houses, presented as social history but tinged with generic ancestor veneration (e.g., tenement house museums in Glasgow and New York).

A powerful history of Jewish art collectors in France, and how an embrace of art and beauty was met with hatred and destruction In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews—pillars of an embattled community—invested their fortunes in France’s cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country’s army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps. In this rich, evocative account, James McAuley explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle. Weaving together narratives of various figures, some familiar from the works of Marcel Proust and the diaries of Jules and Edmond Goncourt—the Camondos, the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Cahens d'Anvers—McAuley shows how Jewish art collectors contended with a powerful strain of anti-Semitism: they were often accused of “invading” France’s cultural patrimony. The collections these families left behind—many ultimately donated to the French state—were their response, tragic attempts to celebrate a nation that later betrayed them.