hallowed halls.

A hall by any other name would be:


anteroom, entrance hall, lobby, reception, corridor, and my personal favorite [*she plants tongue in cheek here*] - foyer (especially when it's pronounced, "foiyay").

The word foyer came into vogue circa 1855 and it referred to the use of the fireplace or hearth in the anterooms of theaters where patrons would go in between acts to get/stay warm. Charming.

One of the things I love the most about our antique house is its central hall - or foyer, if you will. This space, which will from this point on be referred to as the Entry Hall (because I just can't do the "F" word), is literally the backbone of our house. In their day, not only did these halls provide for the circulation of people that would be separate from the formal living spaces, so as to not interrupt the social gathering taking place in parlors and dining rooms, they were once "central" in the ventilation of these old homes. In today's homes, the large central hall might seem like an extraneous or even extravagant "waste" of precious square feet, but historically they were designed as an open corridor from the front of the house to the back, aligning with a central front and rear door that provided increased air flow and ventilation in the hot and humid Southern climate.

I recently finished reading The Bucolic Plague, by Josh Kilmer-Purcell about his transplanted "Best Life" in Sharon Springs, New York. The Beekman Mansion, which he and his partner purchased in 2007, was built in 1802 and the author goes into great detail about the life they are living there. I have to say I was disappointed he didn't describe, in detail, the house itself. Kilmer-Purcell's brevity aside, he did provide copious details about the Entry and the cross axis of the central halls...one that runs North & South and one that runs East & West. That's when it hit me. What originally sold me on our house - built over 100 years after the Beekman - was the dynamic energy provided by the Entry Hall and stairwell. It is still one of my favorite "rooms" and it isn't even a room. It is precisely this type of space in these vintage homes that provide a graciousness that doesn't happen in the architecture of suburbia now. For example, if our cone of vision is between 40 and 60 degrees, that means that we are not really experiencing a space until we are 5 feet into it, as we cannot see the things in our peripheral vision. What that really means to us is that a tiny little entry area that is only 5 feet long might as well not even be there, since as soon as we come through the door we are already in the next space, visually speaking.

When we look at these spaces through our "21st century, air-conditioned and heated modern- convenienced glasses", we judge these spaces as expendable. However, if we look at them as they were intended to function through "new-fangled pursuit of sustainability glasses", what we see is that the sometimes-architects-but-more-often-carpenters who built these homes knew exactly what they were doing - that everything had a purpose and was deliberately placed...either for social or operational mechanisms.
They just got it.

Each morning while I'm having my coffee in our northeast facing breakfast room, I think to myself how lovely the light is. The cleverness of the Fourqurean family and J.W. McBride, the carpenter who built this place for them in 1921, is not lost on me 89 years later.