Plate XV.—Hallway, Wentworth House, 1750.
The finish of the walls in this type of hall varied. Some were entirely paneled, others showed a quaint landscape paper above a low white wainscot, and still others showed hangings of pictorial import, framed like great pictures. To the last-named class belongs the Lee hall at Marblehead, considered to be one of the finest examples of its type extant. Black walnut is the wood finish here, and the hangings, designed by a London artist, are in soft tones of gray, beautifully blended, and represent scenes of ruined Greece, each set in a separate panel, handsomely carved.
Occasionally, to-day, a staircase of the spiral type is found,—a type that possesses certain satisfying characteristics, but which never enjoyed the popularity of the straight staircase. Some few of the staircases in the old Derby Street mansions at Salem are of this type, as is the staircase at Oak Knoll, in Danvers, the poet Whittier's last residence. The common name for this type of staircase was winder.
A large number of representatives of the finest type of the colonial hall are scattered throughout the North and South, and their sturdiness of construction bids fair to make them valued examples indefinitely. One particularly good example is shown at Hey Bonnie Hall, in Bristol, Rhode Island, a mansion built on Southern lines, and suggesting in its construction the hospitality of that section. Here the hall is twenty feet wide; the walls are tinted their original coloring, a soft rich green, that harmonizes perfectly with the white woodwork and the deep, mellow tones of the priceless old mahogany of the furnishings. A well-designed, groined arch forming a portion of the ceiling, and supported at the corners by four slender white pillars, is one of the apartment's attractive adjuncts, while the dominant feature is the staircase that rises at the farther end, five feet in width, with treads of solid mahogany and simple but substantial balusters of the same wood on either side. The upper hall is as distinctive as the lower one, and exactly corresponds in length and width. Wonderful old furnishings are placed here, and at one end is displayed a fine bit of architectural work in a fanlight window, overlooking the garden.
One wonders, when viewing such a hall as this, how this type could ever have been superseded in house construction, but with the gradual decline in favor of the colonial type of dwelling, it was abolished, and in place of its lofty build and attractive spaciousness, halls of cramped dimensions came into vogue, culminating in the entry passage typical of houses built toward the middle of the nineteenth century. Happily, present-day house builders are coming to a realizing sense of the importance of the hallway, and are beginning to appreciate the fact that, to be attractive, the hall must be ample, well lighted, and of pleasing character. With this realization the beauty of the colonial hall has again demanded attention, and in a large number of modern homes it has been copied in a modified degree.
CHAPTER VI
FIREPLACES AND MANTELPIECES
It is a far cry from the fireplaces of early times to those of the present, when elaborate fittings make them architecturally notable. We read that in the Middle Ages, the fire in the banquet hall was laid on the floor in the center of the large apartment, the smoke from the blazing logs, as it curled slowly upward, escaping through a hole cut in the ceiling. Later, during the Renaissance period, the fire was laid close to the wall, the space set apart for it framed with masonry jambs that supported a mantel shelf. A projecting hood of stone or brick carried the smoke away, and the jambs were useful, inasmuch as they protected the fire from draughts. From this time, the evolution of the fireplace might be said to date, improvement in its arrangement being worked out gradually, until to-day it is numbered among the home's most attractive features. It is interesting to note, in reference to these latter-day specimens, that many of them are similar in design to those of the Renaissance, Louis Sixteenth, and colonial periods.
Not a few of the early fireplaces were of the inglenook type, a fad that has been revived and is much in evidence in modern dwellings; and many of them followed certain periods, such as the Queen Anne style and the Elizabethan design. Several, too, were topped with mantels, features practical as well as ornamental, which are almost always associated with the fireplaces of to-day. Many of the old mantels were very narrow, prohibiting ornamentation with pottery or small bits of bric-a-brac; they were so built, because the designers of early times considered them sufficiently decorative in themselves without any additional embellishment, and their sturdiness and architectural regularity seem to justify this opinion. Mantels and fireplaces of early Renaissance type show in detail an elegance that is characteristic of all the work of that period, the Italian designers being masters in their line.