God is in the Details

Finish, Finis, the Finial

But I was so much older then...

I'm younger than that now.

  ---Bob Dylan

It was in the 90s that we last painted the house, and I recall getting Mom's ok to do something daring...I wanted the field color to be cream, and the woodwork white. When we got to the finial, that architectural finishing touch on the highest point of the roof, I had it brought down and gave it a brush of blue.

This time around, being much younger than our former selves, we asked Tommy to scale Everest, set his sights on the finial, and go for the gold.

The Great Mystery

There's something to see on every side.

As we've ripped boards and relocated piles of dust in the attic of the Emma House we've scanned each inch for marking and numbers on the timbers--anything that would give us a clue as to the origin of the house plan itself.

Queen Anne was the style of choice at the turn of the 20th century and its greatest champion was the Knoxville architect George Franklin Barber (1854-1915) who marketed his house plans through catalogs worldwide.

Barber's drawings featured an overall sense of harmony--with wide verandas and decorative gables with contrasting trim.  His houses often had steep pitched roofs and he was determined that each side and angle of his homes was visually interesting.  Barber's early designs featured turrets and circular elements, and his later designs had columns and symmetrical features like those on our own front porch.

The back porch is still in the works.

A Barber design, Bainbridge, Ga.

Another oblique connection to Barber is that the original builders of the house--the Katzs--were an affluent and educated Jewish family from Nashville who would certainly have known that one of the premiere architects of the era was also a Tennessean.

The original plan of the Emma House is out there somewhere....in a museum, catalog, plan book, or perhaps hiding in plain view on a corner lot in some Southern city.