Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/51643
When this Newburyport homeowner attends a concert of the local cham- ber music ensemble, he strolls out his back door and follows a curving red brick path that winds through terraced gardens, past a Neoclassical per- gola. The path leads to a door that opens into a tall clapboard building crowned with a cupola. Inside, the old world sensibility of the façade gives way to drama, light, and vaulting space. ¶ Framed with original beams darkened with age, with floors negotiated via steel and bowed-ash stairs, whose bamboo treads appear to float in space, and fea- turing vast swaths of light reflected by taut white sails, the interior of this 1850 carriage house is nothing short of dazzling. When a string quartet gathered in one corner of the ground floor begins to play, the rapt audience finds that the acoustics are extraordinary. The atmosphere is magical. ¶ "The lot occupied by this building was threatened with development," says the owner of the carriage house, which serves as a concert hall tonight. "This would have been torn down. More than anything, we wanted to make sure that didn't happen." ¶ He and his wife, owners of one of the impos- ing Federal manses for which New- buryport is famous, bought the prop- erty, thus saving it from demolition. In the process, they also saved the surrounding neighborhood, a lightly settled lane just off a busy city street. 116 Old carriage house are like old barns; they are stout workhorses in service to a technology long gone. Sometimes they become garages, their façades cut up with awkward entries for cars, while much of the tall space required by horses and carriages stands unused. Eventu- ally, decay sets in, and another reminder of New England's rural past becomes a liability that is razed and soon forgotten. Thus, when this couple bought and restored an architecturally imposing mid-19th-century carriage house and made it available to the community, they performed public services on many levels. The irony: The carriage house they saved does not accompany their own grand house; it once served the house next door. It all represents the