Home and Garden

Once, many decades if not a century or two ago, the home you just purchased was beautiful. But that was before the original wallpaper had been scraped off, dropped ceilings put in, original walls knocked out, and the pine-plank floors covered with linoleum.

Clearly your home deserves better and you have every intention of restoring much of its former beauty. But just where does one begin to discover what the placed looked like in its heyday?

The first step, says Lynne Dakin Hastings, curator and chief of cultural resource management at Hampton National Historic Site, is to seek out those who can help implement your plan of action. Hastings recommends first taking care of the floors, ceilings and walls and worrying about the furniture later. “It's almost like one has to internalize the personality of the house,” she says. “There are some things that are correct for Hampton Mansion, but that would make no sense in a log cabin.”

As far back as ancient Egypt and, even more recently, during the Italian Renaissance, craftsmen were cutting and fitting stones and tiles into intricate, decorative mosaics. “If you go to Italy and look at some of the cathedrals, you’ll see beautiful ceilings decorated with 1,000-year-old glass mosaics,” says Jan MacLatchie, vice president of marketing for New York-based Artistic Tile.

Yet for many of us, tile, whether ceramic, stone or glass, often conjures up little more than utilitarian rectangles in our kitchens and baths that protect walls or floors from water damage.

But that scenario is rapidly changing as American consumers become more daring and sophisticated and as tile manufacturers offer more and more products that virtually beg to decorate a home.

If one likens a single-level garden to a painting--a combination of textures, colors and shapes—then a terraced garden is more along the lines of a sculpture--textures, colors and shapes, to be sure, but with an intriguing third element of depth and dimension.

Terracing allows gardeners to challenge their imaginations by creating more space for plantings, or a spot to sit and relax and to experiment with either formal or casual waterfalls. It also offers a viable solution to problematic plots of land and presents creative possibilities not always available on a flat surface.

Artist and designer David Wiesand likens his work to that of the great artisans of the Renaissance. “At that time, there were wealthy patrons who commissioned the works and relied on a small community of craftsmen to produce the pieces,” says Wiesand. “Today, we are the artisans for those unique patrons.”

And Wiesand is very grateful for those clients who have the time, money and taste to appreciate his efforts.

These days, Wiesand, owner of McLain Wiesand, is a craftsman and Jack-of-All-Trades when it comes to custom-built furniture. His first love, he acknowledges, is crafting reproduction Neoclassical and Empire furniture, but he is also adept in recreating painted furniture, moldings, murals and sculptures. “I’m lucky in that, in this area of work, I can do a lot of things fairly well,” says the 46-year-old, who holds a masters degree in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. “We've very stubborn and very proud of our work.”

Eleanor McKay prefers to think of chandeliers as architectural adornments for the home. “When we create a chandelier for a residence, we view it as a piece of jewelry,” says McKay, a founder and partner in Annapolis's full-service home furnishings company, Niermann Weeks.

Today chandeliers are able to fit nicely in virtually any style home—from rustic to high-tech. It is important to bear in mind that a home’s lighting is a small detail that, properly done, can make a home fabulous. “Lighting can flatter a home or make it look like a disaster area,” says McKay.