Major history:
- 1954 – built
- 1968 – bedroom wing and laundry / back bathroom wing additions; bomb shelter, crawl spaces
- 1980s – sunroom added, kitchen remodeled
- 2012 – sold for the first time; renovation
- 2021 – basement remodeling
See also: renovation journal
Details:
Ruth Rauch: 1950-something … house built. * Original architect (Britton/Hathaway/Bednarski) did 95 Red Gate Lane, 101 Red Gate Lane, and a parks building on 116 … “The senior architect was a man named Britton, in Greenfield, MA. It was his office in Greenfield that designed and built some of the UMass buildings as well as Hopkins Academy. He did not usually build private homes but he had his architects named Harvey Hathaway and John Bednarski, both architects giving supervision to all the buildings that came from Britton’s Office, he designed and had ours built at same” — Ruth Rauch
interior
- “master bedroom” used to be two kid bedrooms
- corner office / dressing room used to be the master bedroom
- laundry shoot used to go to a rolling basket in the basement
- kitchen counters were orange
- floor currently was added later
- cherry cabinets from “Apple …” / guy who wrote House
- apothecary cabinet bought by her dad because it reminded him of his dad’s pharmacy
- ada’s room was paula’s room
- bathroom bottom drawer with a shelf for standing on.
exterior
- gravel path used to be a sculpture installation … before that it was a playset with a slide
- ada’s sitting place used to be a sculpture installation
- stone masonry laid by her grandfather
- Squirrel Hill built up during his “japanese phase”, which was started during a sabbatical year; another family lived here for a year & had a lot of bonsai, hundreds of years old; that got him interested and so he built the water garden & the small hill around it … rock garden off the back deck etc.
- rock garden
- plants at 101 Red Gate Lane – wild blueberry or blackberry … olive out by front on carol’s side of the driveway … “japanese lantern” plant (vine?) … mosses – lots of interesting ones from her dad’s moss phase … japanese phase … weeping willow in back where paula played (where treehouse will be) … two peaches that produced fruit near oliver’s side … wild grapes along front, with multiple neighbors … white birch near front of house
- carport used to be open in back before they added the laundry wing