BELOW LEFT: An upstairs bedroom is open to the bell tower. BELOW:
Peixinho replaced an existing — and appalling, he says — fireplace
mantel with this one from the early nineteenth century, adding Dutch
delft tiles in aubergine from the eighteenth century. The 1880 painting
depicts a view from the Bristol ferry, near where Peixinho grew up,
looking toward Mount Hope.
Home Work
Peixinho doesn’t believe the schoolhouse project is so different
from his commissions along Ocean Drive or Bellevue Avenue. On
all home fronts, his success hinges on his ability to work with a
space instead of against it, “keeping it appropriate to the time and
the place. And the use — the program dictates so much,” he says.
“I don’t like Colonial houses with New York apartment interiors
any more than I like New York apartments with pilgrim interiors.”
Built in 1794, the schoolhouse was renovated in the 1880s and
was converted into a single-family summer home in the 1920s.
Some original details remain, including the bell tower, the clapboard
and the separate entrances for girls and boys. But twentieth-century
updates, including a second-floor addition, exterior gingerbread
trim and decorative beams in the living room — “nasty, ponderous
things that made the ceiling seem lower than it was,” Peixinho
says, which he removed — detracted from the home’s provenance.
So he embarked on a full makeover and systems upgrade that
nodded to the building’s original use but also enhanced its
livability, no small task in the town’s oldest one-room school.
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