Collecting Houses

About the Book

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.

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.

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.

About the Author

In writing this book, Anne W. Baker has drawn upon forty years’ experience with more than two hundred antique structures. As a restoration contractor, architectural historian and consultant, she has worked with building owners, private agencies, historical commissions, historical societies, archeologists, and taught classes in Historical Skills. She lives in Westport, Massachusetts.