Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Two homes for Tuesday's Treasures

Ropes Mansion (late 1720s), also called Ropes Memorial, is a Georgian Colonial mansion located at 318 Essex in Salem, Massachusetts photo by @kjp

"This house was first constructed in the late 1720s for merchant Samuel Barnard from Deerfield. As built, the house was sheathed in wood clapboards, consisted of 2.5 stories with 5 × 2-bay windows, and was capped by a slate-shingled, gambrel roof. Barnard was a survivor of an Indian raid which occurred in Deerfield on February 29, 1704 and lived there until 1720. With his wife and infant son since deceased, he moved to Salem and married his second wife Rachel, who was the widow of his cousin Thomas Barnard. Samuel Barnard prospered as a merchant in Salem and was a wealthy individual when the "Ropes mansion" was built for him. Barnard wound up outliving 3 of his 4 wives when he died in 1762, and the house eventually fell out of the family when it was sold by his nephew to Judge Nathaniel Ropes in 1768.

Ropes graduated Harvard University in 1745 with a degree in law and started out as a lawyer. He was a representative of Salem in the colonial legislature in 1760 and 1761, and served on the Governor’s Council , was also a judge on the Inferior Court of Common Pleas and a judge of probate until 1772, when he was appointed as a justice on the Superior Court of Judicature. Ropes was soon brought into controversy over how judges were paid at the time. Although he was acquainted with patriots such as John Adams, an issue remained where he still held loyalist views. Just before or during the Revolutionary War a mob is said to have raged outside of the house to protest his loyalist ties. In one of the traditional narratives, this event takes place in March 1774 when Ropes was on his deathbed with smallpox. The mob was supposedly a contributing factor as he died the following day.

As the house subsequently passed through generations of the Ropes family the interior of the structure was extensively renovated in 1807. The central entrance with "fluted Ionic columns" also dates to sometime around 1830 when five interior rooms and the central hall were remodeled.

The Ropes family inhabited the house until 1907 with the death of the last of 3 sisters. At present, the Ropes Mansion is now a museum owned by the Peabody Essex Museum which gives seasonal self-guided house tours. These are capped by only allowing a certain number of people in the mansion at a given time.

The Ropes Mansion was featured in the 1993 Disney film Hocus Pocus where one of the main characters named Allison lives. It has since been nicknamed "Alison's House" by fans of the film as a reference.

----------

Frank Lloyd Wright

- Tirranna House - 1955

New Canaan -Connecticut

The New Canaan, Conn., property was built in 1955, for Joyce and John Rayward, who were close friends of the architect at the time.

According to the release, Wright worked and lived at Tirranna while designing the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The coolest part is that the residence’s greenhouse was built using the same scalloped glass he had left over from the project.

Tirranna, which gets its name from the Australian Aboriginal word for “running waters,” is positioned along the Norton River and overlooks a large pond and waterfall.

The stone-clad house is laid out in a semi-circle, a shape that frequently appears throughout Wright’s work. Altogether, the 7,000-square-foot property features seven bedrooms and eight and a half bathrooms.

One of the biggest private homes in Frank Lloyd Wright’s portfolio just traded hands for $6 million. The lush 14-acre spread was initially listed back in May 2023 for $8 million.