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About Chadsworth Columns

Chadsworth’s 1.800.COLUMNS, founded in 1987, is a leading manufacturer & distributor of architectural columns representing the orders of classical architecture.

‘Invoking an Ideal’ — Chadsworth Featured in Architectural Digest

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Invoking an Ideal

Romanticized Forms Pay Homage to Southern Architectural Traditions in a Historic Landscape
 
Architecture by Ike Kligerman Barkley/Interior Design by Renée O’Leary
Text by Joseph Giovannini/Photography by Durston Saylor
Published June 2008
In some circles, having multiple personalities may be viewed as a psychological disorder, but in architecture, it can be a good thing.

  

When the New York firm Ike Kligerman Barkley was commissioned to design a house in the Virginia horse country, several considerations pulled the architects in complex and contradictory directions. Thomas Jefferson, Monticello and the Palladian tradition of plantation houses still weigh heavily on the collective architectural psyche. Yet in the more specific context of the Green Springs Historic District, a protected agricultural landscape, most buildings are modest farmhouses. While the house had to hold its own on a 1,000-acre site within the historic-land trust, it couldn’t overwhelm empty nesters who were retiring from New York to live in a landscape they had no intention of dominating. “We wanted something that would fit in with the area,” says Renée O’Leary, the client, a professional designer who did the interiors. She and her husband had worked previously with the architects on their home in Connecticut (see Architectural Digest, August 1999). 

  

  

The land, then, with rolling hills, pasturage, native cedars and a 10-acre lake, looked innocent—and large enough to handle just about anything—but it was actually a multivalent site charged with conflicting expectations. Fitting it into a context polarized between manor and farmhouse meant multiplying its architectural personality. The big house had to be small, underbuilt for a very large piece of land, and it had to be significant yet discreet. “We wanted to do something appropriate, something that would sit lightly on the land,” says Thomas Kligerman, one of the firm’s three partners. The clients needed a horse barn, one that could also shelter the cats and dogs the couple foster. 

 

  

“It was the first house of any size in that area since the 1880s, so we felt a lot of pressure to build something worthy of the setting,” says partner-in-charge Joel Barkley, who was born and raised in the South and who seemed to breathe a southern accent into the project. Complicating—and enriching—the task was the ruin of Hawkwood, a pre-Civil War Tuscan-style house designed by the eminent New York architect Alexander Jackson Davis. “It’s just across the road, so there’s a direct visual connection,” Barkley adds. “Since it’s a ruin, there’s a kind of romantic sense here, a nostalgia, that I wanted to pursue.” 

Barkley brought other extrinsic concerns to weigh on the character of the design: “Escaping to the country from city living makes me think of Virgil and his Bucolica,” he says. “I wanted to build on the classical ideal of taking refuge in the pastoral landscape, a civilized retreat that would contrast with the brutal reality of the great heat here and the hard clay soil. I think southern architecture can be so powerful because it’s like a white mirage in a green world.”
 
 
 
The architects were essentially mining the spirit of the place to shape the design, but sensing the subtleties of the land, weather and near and distant history meant that no single form could embody all considerations. Barkley chose several forms rather than one, creating an episodic structure with a narrative instead of casting the building as a single image built at a single point in time. The centerpiece of the house is a stuccoed, templelike entrance pavilion with an august portico of four columns. The roof slopes down to a clapboard appendage, which looks as though it was added by subsequent owners in more humble circumstances. On the other side of the portico, there’s a slightly grander wing with tall, aristocratic, triple-hung windows, which in turn abuts a two-story clapboard building that reads as a farmhouse. The rear side opens to a second-story porch over a gallery paved in brick. An arched porte cochere springs to a pure, pointedly simple two-story, Greek Revival-style structure that recalls small country churches.
 
  
The house may be large at 6,500 square feet, but it is modestly rather than proudly large, and it appears even smaller because the architects have broken the whole into a rambling, charming concatenation of sections expressing different historical periods and social conditions. Barkley purposely made the house unsymmetrical, but he explains that it is composed of “locally symmetrical objects that form a kind of jumble outside any normal hierarchy.” Each segment is only one room deep, without corridors. “I maximized the outside surface area to get lots of windows, breezes, views and sunlight,” he says, noting, “It’s not the cheapest way of building a house.”
 
 
To add more diversity to the diversity, partner John Ike designed the nearby barn as a steeplelike building, inspired by entirely different sources. “We heisted the idea from an early-20th-century architect named Harrie T. Lindeberg, who himself probably took it from English structures,” explains Ike. “We wanted to create a simple, iconic form.”
 
 

The stable adds another chapter to the narrative on the property. The geometrically abstract, acutely triangular structure houses the tack and feed rooms and 28 stalls for Renee O’Leary’s horses, as well as a spiral staircase that leads up to an apartment for the groom, in the gable, where there’s a steep, 60-degree pitch. The architect ties the barn visually to the main house via the standing-seam Galvalume roof and the spanking-white paint.

 

Despite the ramble of exterior shapes in the main house, its interior flows with ease and logic. A tall, impressive entrance hall with a black-and-white checkerboard marble floor leads straight onto a library centered on a dignified escutcheon of white molding celebrating the view through a tall window. To the left lies the master suite and to the right the living room, with the dining room beyond. All the public rooms, along with the master suite, are on the first floor. The other three bedrooms are on the second floor. When the couple have no guests, it’s basically a one-bedroom house on the first floor.

 

“In every job I do, I try to think of three adjectives to describe my intentions, and here they were stylish, comfortable and authentic,” says O’Leary. She stressed comfort and informality because the couple keep the doors wide open 10 months of the year, and the free-range dogs drop by on casual visits and roam through the house. In this historical context of Virginia, you have to look twice to realize that the designer cuts the edge with contemporary pieces, such as the dining table with a plaster top and a patinated-steel base. Despite the traditional chairs, the lines overall are clean and softly up to date, eased by natural materials.

 

 O’Leary characterizes the style as “warm modern,” and her palette—pumpkin in the living room, Clydesdale brown in the library and eucalyptus in the dining room—indeed warms the interior. “Once we realized the outside was going to have columns, that it’d be a white house with black trim, I knew we’d have a lot of color inside,” she explains. “I was interested in the contrast.”

 

In addition to the multiple architectural personalities, there were the multiple design voices working in concert from the beginning. “We picked our focal points and tried not to have too many things to look at,” adds O’Leary. “I asked Joel whether he designed from the outside in or the inside out, and he said that it all came up together. That’s how we did the whole house. The exterior, interior and the décor all came up together.”

 

 [cincopa 10689565]

 

  

Traditional Building Magazine Recognizes Chadsworth

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By:  Nicole V. Gagné

Doric, Tuscan, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite. The Classical orders of columns have been enshrined in architectural design since the days of ancient Greece, although their use can be traced back even further, to the Egyptian architect Imhotep in 2600 B.C., who had the surfaces of stone columns carved to resemble bundled reeds, and beyond. The grandeur, solidity and beauty of columns have been design fundamentals throughout human history, and they show no signs of fading in the 21st century, least of all in commercial and institutional settings.

 

The revival of Classicism as an architectural language has meant a resurgence and revitalization in the manufacture of columns. For this survey article, we’ve set aside the vast topic of wood columns and narrowed our focus to suppliers of exterior columns in stone, cast stone, fiberglass and other composites. These firms produce columns in all orders; note too that all are manufacturers and remain uninvolved in column installation. What follows is an outline of five leading companies and the unique products they offer . . .

 

. . .  “We have a lot of custom capability, but it’s a smaller percentage, I’d guess maybe 15 percent.” Jeffrey L. Davis, CEO of Chadsworth, has experienced greater variety in the market. “We’re moving into our third decade now, and it’s fluctuated over the years,” he says. “When interest rates are low and the construction market is on a rise, we sell more of the standard mass-produced columns. When the economy is in a downturn, projects with higher budgets come around and we do more custom work.”

 

Cost is clearly the major consideration in the popularity of standard-design columns. “If your project calls for a custom profile but wood is not an option, we can create a new PolyStone mold to your exact specifications, giving you the desired profile with all the benefits of the material,” says Davis. “Keep in mind that creating these custom molds is costly, anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000, depending on the size and design required. This is in addition to the subsequent unit cost. If it’s a large job, say, 30 units, the price will be spread out among each column and may indeed be cost effective. On the other hand, if you can incorporate one of our stock products into your project, your bottom line will be much lower . . . “

 

. . . Chadsworth takes pride in its innovations in column manufacture. “We have four different kinds of fiberglass columns–filament wound, resin infused, chopped or sprayed up and spun cast,” says Davis. “Filament-wound columns are great when you need a load-bearing capacity. When you touch them or rap on them, however, they sound hollow, so what I like to do with those is fill them up with sand or a sand-vermiculite mixture. You think of a column as holding up a lot of weight, so you don’t want it to sound as if it couldn’t hold up anything. The true innovation would be the PolyStone, or spun-cast, column. We developed this line back in 1992, the result of many years of research and development, and it can hold detail a lot better and feels a lot thicker.”

 

Chadsworth’s fiberglass columns, according to Davis, are used mostly in new construction. “But we also do a big business in replacing wood columns,” he says. “People don’t understand that a wood column must be maintained, and when they buy an old house and it has a rotting wood column, the first thing they think is, ‘I don’t want to have that happen again,’ so they replace it with an FRP column . . .”

 

Visitors to the Poland Branch Library in Poland, OH, are greeted by Colossal Greek Doric columns from Chadsworth Inc. These imposing columns, fabricated in fiberglass, were made with a filament-winding process that comes from the fabrication of rocket and missile cases. Photo: courtesy of Chadsworth Inc.

Home of Distinction: Romancing the Cottage

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PRESENTED IN WRIGHTSVILLE BEACH MAGAZINE

by Marimar McNaughton

The earth is round, but the world is full of seductive edges and remote corners where man wrestles the odds of nature to carve a niche for himself, on distant seaside islands steeped in privacy, where his true visionary genius may come to repose.

Chadsworth, a cottage on the extreme north end of Figure Eight Island, on a site, which the owner says, was at one time heavily treed with live oaks ravaged by hurricanes, is one of those rare private villas where a world traveler retreats behind the façade of an Anglicized Palladian mansion embedded into the fragile barrier island landscape.  The landmark dwelling is at once a prominent navigational aid for mariners traveling the Atlantic and a soft landing for homeowner Jeffrey Davis.

Chiseled from classic architectural styles passed down through the ages, Chadsworth’s exterior represents Davis’ lifelong fascination with Greek and Roman forms, from which he has fashioned a thriving enterprise as a designer and manufacturer of classic columns – a profession and a passion that sends him around the world.

He returns to eastern North Carolina, where he has longstanding family ties and fond memories, to unpack his bags in a home framed by formal highbrow lines, charmed by vernacular coastal Carolina traditions.

“It’s comfortable, it’s traditional, it fits my personality,” Davis says.

The centerpiece of his home is a collection of antiques handpicked during continental and global forages.

“The furniture that I’ve been collecting for over 20 years is all from the early 1800s, whether it be Biedermeier, or First Empire, New York or Regency . . . I collect these things,” Davis says.  “I wanted that period and that type of furniture, and I think that was a starting point.”

The challenge was how to create a context for the furniture in a beach cottage setting.

“I like to live with my antiques.  There’s nothing in here that you can’t sit on, you can’t touch, you can’t do something with.  My dogs jump on every single thing in the house, kids do too,” Davis says.

When it was time to design his permanent home, Davis recruited a trusted colleague, Christine G.H. Franck, who, like Davis himself, sits on the board of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America.  With a combined 25 years of tenure, the pair teams up with other design professionals, working tirelessly, teaching and traveling, to spread the mission of the institute, which is dedicated to advancing the practice and appreciation of the classical tradition in architecture and allied arts.  Franck, for her design work on Chadsworth Cottage, also received a coveted 2007 Palladio Award, named in honor of Renaissance architect, Andrea Palladio, for her outstanding work in traditional design.

“One of the things that we were faced with early on was the parameters of building here,” says Franck.  “The fact that we had to elevate the first floor as high as we did to 13.5 feet finish flood elevation . . .given that, we then looked at all the different options.”

Those options were Palladian villas, English villas and American Federal houses that Franck says are based on Roman precedents, elevated on a high base.

“We made that decision fairly early on, so that the overall design direction for the house was going to be in this Anglo-Palladian tradition,” Franck says.

“Jeff was also very clear about wanting the house to have a sense of character and place to eastern North Carolina.  He didn’t want it to look like it should be anywhere other than her,” she adds.

The bows to eastern North Carolina can be found in the details, like distinctive black shutters and window sashes derived from tar-based glazing compounds used in coastal settings to prevent rot.  Corner pilasters, vented soffits, blue porch ceilings, figurative “bundled wheat” balcony spindles and the interior stair hall were borrowed from historic sites in nearby New Bern.

Franck’s brilliant design blends formal and informal interiors that reiterate Davis’ love of symmetry and balances his gregarious lifestyle with a need for solitude – entertaining as many as 300 guests on the lawn, hosting intimate family gathering at holiday time or private dinner parties in the grand hall and the dining room, or retreating to his singularly quiet balcony, where he looks over the Rich’s Inlet sand spit, and idyllic windswept vista – savannah, white sand and feisty surf.

Very public spaces, like outdoor showers, and very private places are stacked within the footprint of the three-story, three-bedroom, three-bath home from the ground level to the attic dormer windows that crown the hipped roof.

Supported by load-bearing columns, representing the lowest to the highest orders of classical architecture, incorporated into the fabric of the house, both the interior and exterior column forms rise with each successive function.

“The classical orders have a hierarchy to them,” Franck explains.

“The Tuscan order on the porch columns is a strong order, and it gives this house the sense that it’s projecting strength out over the water.  The (interior) Ionic capitals downstairs are from the Erechtheum, which is a small building on the Acropolis.  The Corinthian order is the highest of the orders, if you will,” she says, admitting that there are at least three schools of thought that define classic columns and their origins, spurring much debate historically.  Undisputedly, the Corinthian columns in Davis’ master suite were inspired by the Tower of the Winds from Athens, Greece.

“The Tower of the Winds capital and the Tower of the Winds border that you see in here is what started my company,” Davis says.  “It’s the first column that I actually built . . . and it’s the column that built this house, literally.”

“Sometimes I think it’s important to create a fiction, if you will, for a house,” Franck says.  The fictionalized story she weaves of someone who lived along the Carolina coast, who might have been involved in the trade industry, who brought back some tiles from Holland, picked up a cane chaise in India, a First Empire day bed from one of Napoleon’s castles, an 1832 Biedermeier dining table from Austria and a writing desk from Germany, and brought them home to his island retreat, is not far-flung from the truth.

To lighten the intensity of the antiquities and the treasures, Davis and Franck collaborated on a window treatment used throughout the house, combining wooden plantation blinds with sheer, diaphanous drapes.

“Part of what we were going for,” Franck says, “was this kind of Caribbean . . . almost trade-oriented house . . . where you get the blinds, you get the breeze coming through the windows, you get the slats of light . . . a lot of this is to downplay the formality of the furniture and to make it a comfortable light, air-flowing house and place to be in.”

Embellishing that fiction is the Chadsworth name.  Davis says, “I wanted a name that sounded old, as if we’d been in business for hundreds of years.”

From the north end of Figure Eight Island, the visionary genius gazes out to sea.

“I love this porch out here.  The columns, and the view, it’s absolutely gorgeous,” he says.  Chadsworth, his cottage, appears as if it had always been there, his homeplace for hundreds of years.

 

Expert Tips for Fresh Porch Style

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Exerpt from Southern Living Magazine 

 

One-of-a-kind details and punchy colors set this outdoor room apart.

 

To see some of the best rooms in the South, it’s not always necessary to set foot inside. No matter what you call your outdoor living space–porch, terrace, courtyard, deck–trust us, it has incredible potential. So if you’re not using every square inch, follow these expert tips.

 

Privacy, Please
Washington, D.C., architect Bruce Wentworth aimed for a Colonial Revival style for his porch. Tuscan columns border the space, with metal-and-tempered glass railings running between them on two sides. This supersmart pairing makes the area feel more private and enclosed yet still open to the backyard garden, which was planned by landscape designer Mark White. The railings don’t actually touch the columns; they’re freestanding. Why? To avoid straight metal meeting curved wood, which can be an “unattractive intersection,” to use architecture lingo. Along the south side of the patio, Bruce and his wife, Eryl, collaborated on a cool idea: They installed a panel of shutters, fixed at the top and bottom. By moving the louvers, they can better control the sunlight and breezes.

 

Enhance the Light
Having a covered porch is great when you want to outfit it with plush furniture, but you usually have to sacrifice light. Bruce thought of that and designed a skylight in the center of the porch’s ceiling. Now sunlight illuminates the sofa and chairs. “I love that this is an ‘in-between’ room,” says Bruce. “You’re not completely inside but not completely outside, so you can sit out here any time of day.”

 

Sources:
Architect: Bruce Wentworth, Wentworth Studio, 8555 Connecticut Avenue, Suite 200, Chevy Chase, Maryland, 240-395-0705, www.wentworthstudio.com. Sofa and chairs by Lloyd/Flanders, www.lloydflanders.com. Columns by Chadsworth’s, www.columns.com. Green and white striped outdoor fabric and green chenille outdoor fabric by Sunbrella, www.sunbrella.com.

 

         

 

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Chadsworth’s 1.800.COLUMNS Classic Pergola Series was selected by readers of Residential Design & Build Magazine as one of the most interesting products for 2006.

 

Chadsworth’s 1.800.COLUMNS Classic Pergolas are unaffected by moisture or insects and made to last a lifetime.  Choose from a 2, 4, 6, or 8 column pergola kit that includes PolyStone Columns with Roman Doric capitals and attic bases, and rafters made of Cellular Polyvinyl Chloride.  The pergolas are ready to prime and paint, and are available in a variety of sizes.

 

“In this issue we look at things through a builders eye,” says editor Rob Heselbarth, “the building materials, the craftsmanship, the products—it proves to be very interesting. The products chosen are those builders come to rely on and use regularly on the job.”  For more information, see the Nov/Dec Issue of Residential Design & Build.

 

For more information on Chadsworth’s 1.800.COLUMNS Classic Pergola Series visit their web site at www.columns.com.