Bob Vila's Guide to Historic Homes of America™



Dana-Thomas House

In this A&E Special Presentation Bob Vila's Guide to Historic Homes of America, Bob takes viewers on a six hour coast-to-coast tour of remarkable old American homes. Each two-hour episode explores historic homes in one particular region: the Northeast, the South, and the Mid-West and West. Bob travels from the seaside mansions of wealthy New Hampshire traders to Palladian-style homes in Thomas Jefferson's Virginia. He visits resplendent plantations in Natchez, Mississippi and travels to two of Frank Lloyd Wright's most memorable houses, including Fallingwater. The tour also goes to Texarkana, Texas; to a Spanish Colonial house in Monterey, California; and other points west.

Bob brings to the trip his incisive eye for the way these houses were built, set in the context of their time. The tour is rich in family stories and furniture, in houses at mid-restoration, and in great architecture of uniquely American character. Bob visits more than 20 homes in all -- some plain Colonials, others exuberantly Victorian. He shows houses of the Prairie and of classical Palladian design, examining styles that range from English and Dutch to Spanish and more.



	Olana House

Episode I:
The Northeast opens at the oldest house in Manhattan, the Morris-Jumel Mansion (1765). A grand Palladian structure built as a country home for a British officer and his wealthy American wife, the mansion overlooks Yankee Stadium from a bluff in Harlem Heights and is filled with exquisite French and American Empire antiques. Its imposing columns, perfect symmetry, and exquisite detail bespeak its neo-classical origins. George Washington slept here; Aaron Burr lived here. Second is the Dyckman House (1784) on Broadway in Upper Manhattan. This simple but elegant home, built by the prominent Dyckman family when Upper Manhattan was pastoral farmland, is furnished to show styles at the turn-of-the-nineteenth century. Next Bob travels to Hancock Shaker Village in western Massachusetts. Here at the "City of Peace" the utopian Shaker sect lived a communal but celibate existence. The stripped-down simplicity of their farm buildings and dwelling house (1830) reflects both holiness and practicality.

Continuing his tour of great old Northeast homes, Bob visits four restored houses in the little seaside community once known as Strawbery Banke -- now Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Today, nearly four centuries of history are celebrated in the homes, stores, shops, and museum spaces at the Strawbery Banke restoration. One of the homes built in the eighteenth century, the Drisco House, has been restored to the way it was during the 1950s. The Chase House, from the early nineteenth century, is a mansion chockablock with the high-style furniture of the mercantile elite. The simpler Rider-Wood House shows a comfortable middle-class existence, and the Joshua Wentworth House is a giant Georgian awaiting restoration. The Northeast closes at Olana (1870), an architectural masterpiece built by painter Frederick Church on a mountain overlooking the Hudson River. Olana is a multicolored fantasy home and studio, a palatial amalgam of Middle-Eastern and European influences.



Drisco House

Episode II:
The South begins with Thomas Jefferson, the architect. Bob visits the University of Virginia (1817-1826), a memorable campus whose 10 residential pavilions surround the great, terraced Lawn -- its most famous neoclassical Rotunda. The American Institute of Architects proclaimed theses buildings the most significant architectural achievement of the nation's first 200 years. Bob moves on to Ash Lawn-Highland (1799), the simple Virginia farmhouse that was the home to President James Monroe for nearly a quarter-century. An exercise in contrasts, this plain planter's house was decorated by the educated Monroe with fine French furniture and a bust of Napoleon given to Monroe by the Emperor himself. Next are Jefferson's two homes -- his retreat, the octagonal Poplar Forest (1806-1809) and the magnificent Monticello (1769-1809). Poplar Forest is undergoing complete restoration; Bob's fans will find its bare masonry and unfinished surface familiar. At Monticello, a truly American shrine, he ventures into the Dome Room at the top of the building -- not open to the public -- and the "Honeymoon Cottage" where Monticello began.

The South continues with a look at antebellum architecture in Natchez, Mississippi. Here, Bob visits the House on Endicott Hill, an early trader's house; Rosalie, an exquisite Federal-style mansion with its Belter furniture and panoramic view of the Mississippi; Stanton Hall, perhaps the grandest Greek Revival house anywhere; and Longwood, a never-finished house abandoned by its Yankee builders in April of 1861. This ghostly construction site is complete with a left-behind antique carpenter's bench, half-filled paint pots, and 134-year-old dust. This episode closes with The Ace of Clubs House (1885), a peculiar confection in Texarkana, Texas. Built in the shape of the playing-card symbol (its owner won the construction money in a poker game), it was home to lumbermen and ranchers, chronicling the styles of the wealthy from the turn-of-the-century through the 1930s.



	Ellwood House

Episode III:
The Mid-West and West follows American expansion toward the Pacific coast. Bob starts at the Ellwood House Museum (1879) on the outskirts of Chicago. Isaac Ellwood, the man who patented and manufactured the barbed wire that fenced in the West, was its builder. It's an essay on changing tastes, with a Victorian staircase, Jacobean living room, original furnishings, Colonial Revival revisions, and a scaled-down Victorian playhouse with verge boards, Eastlake spindlework, and other details. There's also a world-class collection of barbed wire.

Next, Bob meets Frank Lloyd Wright at the peak of his Prairie style, in Wright's Dana-Thomas House (1904) in Springfield, Illinois. It's richer in detail than any other Wright home. Next stop is Fallingwater (1936-1939), regarded by many as Wright's masterpiece. Bob studies the structure closely, showing some rare home movies of the house's unusual construction -- true to its name, it's set in a waterfall.

California offers Bob a chance to look at the Cooper-Molera Adobe (ca. 1840) in Monterey, an early Spanish Colonial house that merges Mexican and American cultures. After that Bob visits Filoli (1915-1917) in Woodside. Designed by noted architect Willis Polk, this house and its exquisite landscape reflect its owners -- mostly San Francisco businessmen who spent vast sums collecting art and cultivating the gardens.

Finally, there's Tor House (1918 and after), poet Robinson Jeffers's owner-built stone house and tower. This breathtaking family home, which looks out into the Pacific from the rocky Carmel shore, ends Bob's cross-country journey through America's fine homes.

Bob Vila's Guide to Historic Homes of America airs periodically on A&E and can be purchased as a three video boxed set. For more information call 1-800-423-1212 or visit the A&E website.