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House Beautiful, August 2006
"The Childhood Home Fantasy"
PENELOPE GREEN: You've taken an old family house and tweaked it just so. Now, it is the archetypal summer getaway. I know I've dreamed this house, right down to the robin's egg blue walls, the white picket fence, and the lupines standing like soldiers outside the sun porch. What was the story you wanted to tell, and how did you begin?
MARKHAM ROBERTS: James and his family had spent summers there when he and his sisters were young. Someone else had lived in the house for a period, but his sister Cathy was able to buy it back four years ago. She wanted to make it the family house again. It was incredibly dreary, all this crazy dark furniture with dusty old lady pink fabric and wallpaper. The first step was to make you feel like you wanted to be in the house. We got rid of the hideous repro Victorian wallpaper and the unusable furniture, but kept most of the family things, which had remained in the house. And then we painted everything: white, turquoise blue, and teal. Blue and white are intuitive colors for a seaside house.
PG: Port Townsend may be the ultimate getaway. It's certainly a long way from New York City, where you both live.
MARKHAM: It's heaven out here in Washington. Everything is so much bigger and more dramatic. The trees are taller, the beaches are rougher, the water is bluer and colder, and the sky is limitless. There are vast mountain ranges and volcanoes in every direction. The house is on a cliff overlooking Puget Sound, and there's an 80-foot drop to the beach. Everything's wilder. James and I have a small black poodle named Choppy, and one day I walked outside and spotted a bald eagle circling about her. Needless to say, no more alone time for Choppy in the yard!
PG: What I like is how everything in the house looks particular and eccentric, but fresh, too. Funky but not fusty.
MARKHAM: The house is so special, and the furniture is so quirky and weird, I just wanted to make it comfortable for people like me to sit there. I'm a six-foot-tall man who lives in the 21st century. The sunporch, for example, had this white wicker set that wasn't so comfortable, so we found another that was and just mixed it in. It's like life - you can't throw everything out, you just gotta deal. Lots of stuff worked, though. The house is really a cottage and it should look just thrown together. What I most wanted to do was make it a cheery place.
PG: How did you decide what stayed, and what got the heave-ho?
JAMES SANSUM: We kept furniture and objects that had memories, and then Markham figured out where everything should go. He refinished some pieces, painted others, and had everything reupholstered. Because we wanted this to be a meeting house for the whole family, my uncle, my sisters and their children, and me, we all brought things to the house. Some of the furniture I bought when I was 16 from the money I made for a book I wrote on the town's Victorian houses. There's the American Eastlake-style settee in the living room that's about the same age as the house, 1870s, and the mahogany chest of drawers in my bedroom upstairs. That's American, too, from about 1850. The dining room table had been in the carriage house, all dinged and scuffed. Markham painted it white and brought it inside.
PG: So many shells! Did you and your sisters collect them when you were kids?
JAMES: They were collected by me, my nephews, my uncles, my great-uncles, and my grandparents. The house has become the repository of all the family shelling, as it were.
PG: We all need a Markham.
JAMES: It's true. He also helped me appreciate the odd architecture of the house, its quirks and imperfections. Things always bothered me because they weren't perfect, like the way the bottom steps of the staircase protrude out so you have to walk up and over them. One of the things he loves is that the history of the house is really apparent.
PG: Was there a moment the house finally felt revivified?
JAMES: One of the most important moments was removing the old wallpaper. The whole point was to rescue the house, to bring back childhood memories and to change the karma. Last summer we had a small family reunion, the first time we had been together in the house since 1985, when my mother died. People were a bit hesitant to even come, because there is always a lot of emotion linked to a family house. Everyone was just amazed and thrilled about how it looked, and they all said to Markham, 'Thank you for saving this house.'
JAMES: Family furniture can sometimes just look like brown masses. It's really hard to just take the plunge and paint something or reupholster it. Every old house has a sort of vibe and feeling, and Markham was able to get in touch with that, too. What hasn't changed about the house is the feeling of calm that runs over you when you look out at that expanse of water. I'm so thankful that my nephews are experiencing what we did as kids. They're going on the same walks we walked.
MARKHAM: The first summer we just sat in Adirondack chairs and watched television inside. You couldn't sit in anything else, nothing was quite comfortable. There was a need to make it so that you actually wanted to be inside the house. Because I was staying there and loved the house the way James and his family do, the changes I made were gentle, they made sense. I don't feel like I imprinted myself on anything. The house is the way it is, and the decorating comes from that. The getaway is all about where the town is, the beauty of the Sound, and the ships going by. And the house sits beautifully in that place.
"The Childhood Home Fantasy"
PENELOPE GREEN: You've taken an old family house and tweaked it just so. Now, it is the archetypal summer getaway. I know I've dreamed this house, right down to the robin's egg blue walls, the white picket fence, and the lupines standing like soldiers outside the sun porch. What was the story you wanted to tell, and how did you begin?
MARKHAM ROBERTS: James and his family had spent summers there when he and his sisters were young. Someone else had lived in the house for a period, but his sister Cathy was able to buy it back four years ago. She wanted to make it the family house again. It was incredibly dreary, all this crazy dark furniture with dusty old lady pink fabric and wallpaper. The first step was to make you feel like you wanted to be in the house. We got rid of the hideous repro Victorian wallpaper and the unusable furniture, but kept most of the family things, which had remained in the house. And then we painted everything: white, turquoise blue, and teal. Blue and white are intuitive colors for a seaside house.
PG: Port Townsend may be the ultimate getaway. It's certainly a long way from New York City, where you both live.
MARKHAM: It's heaven out here in Washington. Everything is so much bigger and more dramatic. The trees are taller, the beaches are rougher, the water is bluer and colder, and the sky is limitless. There are vast mountain ranges and volcanoes in every direction. The house is on a cliff overlooking Puget Sound, and there's an 80-foot drop to the beach. Everything's wilder. James and I have a small black poodle named Choppy, and one day I walked outside and spotted a bald eagle circling about her. Needless to say, no more alone time for Choppy in the yard!
PG: What I like is how everything in the house looks particular and eccentric, but fresh, too. Funky but not fusty.
MARKHAM: The house is so special, and the furniture is so quirky and weird, I just wanted to make it comfortable for people like me to sit there. I'm a six-foot-tall man who lives in the 21st century. The sunporch, for example, had this white wicker set that wasn't so comfortable, so we found another that was and just mixed it in. It's like life - you can't throw everything out, you just gotta deal. Lots of stuff worked, though. The house is really a cottage and it should look just thrown together. What I most wanted to do was make it a cheery place.
PG: How did you decide what stayed, and what got the heave-ho?
JAMES SANSUM: We kept furniture and objects that had memories, and then Markham figured out where everything should go. He refinished some pieces, painted others, and had everything reupholstered. Because we wanted this to be a meeting house for the whole family, my uncle, my sisters and their children, and me, we all brought things to the house. Some of the furniture I bought when I was 16 from the money I made for a book I wrote on the town's Victorian houses. There's the American Eastlake-style settee in the living room that's about the same age as the house, 1870s, and the mahogany chest of drawers in my bedroom upstairs. That's American, too, from about 1850. The dining room table had been in the carriage house, all dinged and scuffed. Markham painted it white and brought it inside.
PG: So many shells! Did you and your sisters collect them when you were kids?
JAMES: They were collected by me, my nephews, my uncles, my great-uncles, and my grandparents. The house has become the repository of all the family shelling, as it were.
PG: We all need a Markham.
JAMES: It's true. He also helped me appreciate the odd architecture of the house, its quirks and imperfections. Things always bothered me because they weren't perfect, like the way the bottom steps of the staircase protrude out so you have to walk up and over them. One of the things he loves is that the history of the house is really apparent.
PG: Was there a moment the house finally felt revivified?
JAMES: One of the most important moments was removing the old wallpaper. The whole point was to rescue the house, to bring back childhood memories and to change the karma. Last summer we had a small family reunion, the first time we had been together in the house since 1985, when my mother died. People were a bit hesitant to even come, because there is always a lot of emotion linked to a family house. Everyone was just amazed and thrilled about how it looked, and they all said to Markham, 'Thank you for saving this house.'
JAMES: Family furniture can sometimes just look like brown masses. It's really hard to just take the plunge and paint something or reupholster it. Every old house has a sort of vibe and feeling, and Markham was able to get in touch with that, too. What hasn't changed about the house is the feeling of calm that runs over you when you look out at that expanse of water. I'm so thankful that my nephews are experiencing what we did as kids. They're going on the same walks we walked.
MARKHAM: The first summer we just sat in Adirondack chairs and watched television inside. You couldn't sit in anything else, nothing was quite comfortable. There was a need to make it so that you actually wanted to be inside the house. Because I was staying there and loved the house the way James and his family do, the changes I made were gentle, they made sense. I don't feel like I imprinted myself on anything. The house is the way it is, and the decorating comes from that. The getaway is all about where the town is, the beauty of the Sound, and the ships going by. And the house sits beautifully in that place.