Painted Lady
There is something that doesn’t settle well with some visitors to the Johns House, but it’s not easily put into words. The low wrought iron fence wrapping the corner lot seems a tad out of scale with the massive home. The windows don’t seem to align between the upper and lower floors. The quarter-moon panes are off-centered in the attic eaves. The misfit Queen Anne roofline balances too precariously atop its heavy Italianate base. It is two houses in one: an established, dignified, well-planned architectural icon — and an impulsive afterthought. It is a house that was never meant to be.
Despite its idiosyncrasies, its chaotic roof angles and mishmash of brick-a-brack — its general imbalance — it’s still pleasant enough to look at. The wraparound porch provides shade in the summer, a safe haven during hide and seek, a porch swing creaking as you swat mosquitoes and watch for fireflies on humid August nights.
The Johns House might make an awkward painted lady, but is still beautiful enough to distract most people from noticing her flaws. At a glance, she could even be breathtaking. Those were my mother’s first words about the mansion: “She took my breath away the moment I saw her.”
Most people don’t notice the uneven wear on the porch floorboards, or the chipping paint in the crevices between the rippled glass windows and their rotting frames. Visitors who walk up to the imposing front door are too seduced by the smell of honeysuckle and wisteria wrapping around them to notice that the aging vines are choking the gutters.
Besides, at first these imperfections are signs of a house well-loved and well lived-in, a historic home with stories to tell. “If these walls could talk,” some of my mother’s clients say, “just think of the things they’ve seen.” Individually, they are simply signs of aging, like the creases that deepen around her eyes when my mom smiles. Well earned, signs of a life well-lived. But collectively, sometimes I wonder if these flaws always meant more.
