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<\/p>\nJuly\/August 2007<\/p>\n
By Colin W. Sargent<\/p>\n
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\u201cThere will be no gold records on the wall<\/em>.\u201d Restoration buffs are buzzing about singer\/songwriter Daryl Hall\u2019s recent purchase of the oldest house in Maine. The hammer price at auction for the John Bray House at Kittery\u2019s Pepperrell Point was just under $2 million.<\/p>\n How did you feel when you first personally toured this house? <\/strong><\/p>\n My first impression was, \u2018how English,\u2019 as opposed to Colonial American. I know this because I\u2019ve just finished renovating a 1740 house in London, in Hammersmith. For example, I was surprised to find high plaster ceilings in this 345-year-old structure in Kittery, which make it more akin to an English house than an American Colonial house. The house is oak beamed. There are no chamfered beams and things indicative of a 17th-century house in most places in America. It was built ahead of its time.<\/p>\n Was this first excursion up here before the auction? <\/strong><\/p>\n Just before. I subscribe to Antiques and The Arts Weekly, an antiques magazine in Newtown, Connecticut, and they have a small real estate section in the back. I just happened to see, coming up for auction, \u201cthe oldest house in Maine,\u201d and I was intrigued. So I asked an architect I know, Analee Cole, to go up to look at the house and just kind of describe it to me\u2013you know, do some research, take some pictures\u2013and when she came back all excited, describing this great house in good nick\u2013English slang for \u201cin good shape\u201d\u2013with beautiful views, I came up a week later and saw what I saw. I really liked the old village it was in; I\u2019d never really seen that part of Kittery before. I loved the age of the house, number one. I felt drawn to something there.<\/p>\n This is starting to sound like a ghost story. <\/strong><\/p>\n A house really does have a feeling. I\u2019m a soul singer; a house can have a bad soul, good soul, and no soul, but believe me, when a house does have a soul you can feel it. I think of ownership of a house in this way: You may have contemporary control over your house, but it has an existence of its own.<\/p>\n Can you describe your views of Pepperrell Cove? <\/strong><\/p>\n When John Bray, who was a shipwright, built this house in 1662, he had his choice of any building site he wanted, and he picked well. It has a lot of shore frontage. Today, looking out over the cove, you see various islands, lighthouses, and the south-facing view is great\u2013good for the weather.<\/p>\n Where\u2019s your favorite spot in the house or grounds\u2013a magic spot? <\/strong><\/p>\n I think the parlor is my favorite right now. It\u2019s where William Pepperrell, who built his mansion three doors away, and John Bray\u2019s daughter were married in 1680. It\u2019s elegant, cozy, with a great outlook into the cove.<\/p>\n You\u2019re already channeling the former owners! Do you feel you have to connect in some way with them in order to restore it correctly? <\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019ve been doing a lot of research. Luckily, the people who have owned this house have passed its story through the generations. I have in my possession just about every article written about it, and the people in it, dating to the 1880s. I have a lot about the configuration of the house in its original state and documents about what\u2019s happened over the last 300 years.<\/p>\n As far as changes are concerned, I\u2019m not going to touch the original part of the house. A general store was built on an adjacent lot around 1830 that they later attached as a wing in the 1920s, and an outdoor porch turned into an indoor porch about the same time. Those are the things that I\u2019m going to address.<\/p>\n So many people think of you as having this cool and contemporary side\u2013is your love for early architecture a hidden part of you? <\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s been there all along. Besides, I don\u2019t look at myself as a very contemporary person. When you\u2019re popular you may be contemporary in your popularity, but in everything I do I have always shot for things that are timeless emotions. Not that I have always succeeded. But I value things by how far they go beyond the contemporary.<\/p>\n If you had lived contemporary with the Bray House, do you think you\u2019d still have been a singer\/songwriter? <\/strong><\/p>\n I would have been a musician in any period in time if I had grown up in my family of musicians. Musicians and carpenters and bricklayers, actually. My father built the house I grew up in, my mother was a musician, and I was a singer in a band.<\/p>\n How much time will you spend up here? <\/strong><\/p>\n Somewhere between living and visiting\u2013 that\u2019s my life! I\u2019ve always been a road person. My career takes me all over the world, but at the same time I like to have my feet on the ground. So all sorts of times in the summer, fall, and spring, I\u2019ll be up in Kittery, living there. It\u2019s only a three-hour drive from two other homes I\u2019m restoring near Millbrook, New York. They were built in 1771 and 1780.<\/p>\n So you\u2019re up here now, puttering around, sampling the local crustaceans\u2026 <\/strong><\/p>\n I had a lobster roll the other day. I love all kinds of seafood, shellfish.<\/p>\n What part of the Bray house has been most neglected?<\/strong><\/p>\n None of it has really been neglected, but someone has renovated the east side of the house, always the unknown part of the house, less than well. That\u2019s probably the most altered part of the house. The documents get more vague when they get to \u201cthe east side lean-to with chambers above\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n When was your first-ever visit to Maine?<\/strong><\/p>\n In the 1970s I guess. We did a rehearsal above Portland somewhere. I\u2019ve played Portland a few times; it\u2019s a very distinct place, not like anywhere else in New England. I really like it a lot, but for one reason or another it hasn\u2019t often turned up for me on tour.<\/p>\n Have any high-profile buddies of yours ever joked with you about this musty passion of yours? <\/strong><\/p>\n I don\u2019t really talk to my contemporaries that much. Musicians seem to stay in their own solar systems. The guys in my band have known about it all along and don\u2019t find it unusual at all. It\u2019s funny. I look at Architectural Digest and see various musicians pictured with their houses and they always look like they\u2019re in hotel rooms\u2013mansions and hotel rooms\u2013and that\u2019s not me. [Laughs] There won\u2019t be any gold records on the walls in the Bray House.<\/p>\n Are there songs people should steer away from if they visit you?<\/strong><\/p>\n Any song I\u2019ve written or am writing\u2013don\u2019t sing. I hear that too often in my head. I\u2019ll be coming to Maine to get away.<\/p>\n What\u2019s the most exciting thing you\u2019ve ever revealed while peeling back some old wallpaper or fixing a wall in one of these old homes you\u2019re restoring? <\/strong><\/p>\n In Dutchess County, New York, I took a house apart piece by piece to restore it. It had been owned by the Bates family from 1771. Finally, after the last of the Bateses died, the caretaker sold it to me. Dismantling it, I found, in the walls, a gray, mummified cat.<\/p>\n Hello!<\/strong><\/p>\n I told the caretaker about it. She said, \u201cThis house was called \u2018the gray cat house\u2019 because a legend passed down through the Bates family says that a gray cat will always live here. When one dies, another will appear out of the woods.\u201d I sort of humored her and went back to putting up the beams. A few weeks later, out of the woods, came a gray kitten. I call her Miss Gray. She hasn\u2019t left since.<\/p>\n Some people like old homes because they miss their parents, or grandparents, or the whole gorgeous sense of a past that just gets discarded like a Handi Wipe. Who are you looking for in your past with these houses? <\/strong><\/p>\n I grew up with a very close sense of history on both sides of my family. We have family furniture and bibles that date to the early 1700s. I\u2019ve lived with a sense of history all my life. [Pause] I\u2019ve watched stone Pennsylvania farmhouses turning into fields full of Mc Mansions and shopping centers and all the crap you see out here. Finding the value of things that might otherwise go to waste [it\u2019s rumored that the underbidder for the 345-year-old Bray House was considering tearing it down] and recovering them, it\u2019s the way people should naturally live. People should live in small, natural, village- like environments, where they get to know each other and are connected to the land and progress is stimulated. I\u2019m very Jeffersonian about that. You can progress toward something better. You don\u2019t always have to progress toward something worse.<\/p>\n
\n\u2013Singer\/songwriter Daryl Hall (of Hall & Oates, viz. \u201cSara Smile,\u201d \u201cKiss On My List,\u201d and \u201cManeater\u201d) has always had a passion for antique homes.<\/p>\n
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