Or, This Old House Volume II
There are countless eccentricities in a house this old. As we mentioned in a previous blog, the building we call home will be turning 170 in 2025 and it has had many owners and occupants over those years. While some owners have treated the place with care and improved it gently, others have been less careful. Even with the best of intentions, renovations can remove important architectural details, or even points of whimsy from years gone by.
For example – somewhere in what is now our common room, there was once a dumbwaiter. We have no idea where. Possibly, somewhere to the southern end of the room, where the bookcases are now. We have a few theories about what that room might have looked like, back when it was first built. It’s possible that the room was once oval, and has since been made square at one end. Without original plans (lost, alas, to time), we can only speculate.
Doors that Don’t Open
What we do know for sure, however, is that there are several doors to nowhere. Which is to say that there are doors which once opened onto a room, a staircase or a closet which are now purely decorative in nature.
The most obvious of these is in the small bathroom on the ground floor. We discovered it while doing renovations in 2019 and decided to make it a feature. If you go around to the other side of the wall that this door is in, you will find a closet and inside that closet, no sign of the door! When we were doing the renovations, we discovered a cut in what is now a solid floor and deduced that this door once led down to the basement. It would have been a steep descent!
Guests who stay in the Beasley room, our ground floor private room, might not even notice the ghost door in the north-east corner of the room. It has been hidden quite well with trim. However, this door once opened into a space that has variously been a closet, a bathroom, and a staircase. If you head down our basement stairs, you will see the door on the landing opposite. Needless to say, it’s sealed tight!
One door that is still technically functional but which was probably never practical, is the second of our two curved doors in the common room. It is currently located behind the computer and opens to the hallway by the back door, where it is blocked by a closet. If the computer desk and closet were removed, you could go through this doorway – but it opens onto such a narrow hall that we suspect that it was only ever intended to make the room symmetrical.
Connecting Doors
There is a door between the back hall and the main hall, which is always open. There is a door between the dormitory and front hall which is always closed. Upstairs, there are phantom doors between almost every room. We speculate that these doors (and the transom windows above them, of which only a few still exist) were there to improve airflow and allow people to move about freely – but they could also be closed to keep spaces warm.
It is fascinating when visiting old houses to try to figure out which doors are original and which have been moved. In large families, such as the Prings, how were bedrooms arranged, and family rooms used? I like to imagine the little Pring children running through these ghost doors, or maybe climbing into the dumbwaiter, or getting up to mischief scampering through the connecting rooms.
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