Anne M. Downey

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Janice Russillo’s house made an impression many months before she was compelled to buy it. She was visiting a friend in Rye Beach, New Hampshire, in 1996 when they drove by the 1895 Queen Anne, Shingle-style house, sadly in a state of neglect.

“There was a seven-acre plot of land with a demolition site on one end, and an old yellow house with a turret and a big front porch sitting off by itself in a corner at the other end,” remembers Janice, who has a bachelor’s degree in urban planning and tends to see things on a large scale. “The grass was about eighteen inches tall and the house looked abandoned, but it seemed sturdy and had personality, and I said to my friend, ‘Now that would make a great beach house.’”

A year and a half later, Janice decided to relocate to New Hampshire, but only if she could find a house near the ocean that fit her budget. Janice had lived in the Midwest for twenty-five years, where she and her husband raised two children, who were now in college. Janice had recently divorced and was looking for a fresh start. Although she had run a successful interior design business in Lake Forest, Illinois, for many years, she recently completed a master’s degree in transpersonal psychology and was working on her doctorate in transformational psychology. She was on a new path, professionally and personally, and when she walked into the yellow house on Rye Beach, something told her that this was the place to begin again.

Where necessary, new molding was made to match the original.

“My realtor and I happened upon it on our way to another property, and I said, ‘That’s my house,’” Janice remembers. “She told me it was going to be demolished because nobody wanted to tackle the renovation and the developer had an offer on the land. As soon as I crossed the threshold, I felt the energy of the space, and knew I had found my home. When the realtor told me the asking price, which was the exact amount of the upper limit of my budget, I thought, ‘God wants me to buy this house.’ I got an inspector in there two days later, made a full price offer and it was mine three weeks before it was slated to be torn down.”

The house’s history
As Janice planned her renovation, she learned as much about the house’s history as she could, although there are still mysteries and pieces of information that keep popping up. “Recently, a friend gave me a picture of the house that he found in a box of old photographs he purchased at a yard sale,” Janice says. “In the picture, there is a circular dirt driveway in front and no door on the south side. If I had seen that photo before I renovated, I might have made different decisions.”

She knows that the house was initially owned by Charles Austin, who might have used it as a summer home. There aren’t any house plans on file, so the builder is unknown—a shame, according to Ron Houghton, one of the builders who worked on Janice’s renovation, because the house’s bones are superlative.

“The construction throughout the house is extremely high quality,” Ron says. “We joked that the guy who built it must have been a

Beautiful custom murals of the outside of the house brighten up a corner.

shipbuilder because it’s so sturdy—the stone foundation is as solid as the day it was built, and there is no cracked plaster or signs of settling.

“And the carpentry is first-rate, the materials exceptional. There is quarter-sawn white oak paneling throughout, the round moldings are hand planed and the construction of the round turret at the front of the house is really impressive,” Ron continues. “It’s just a very special place. To reproduce a house like that today would cost at least $350 per square foot.”

In the 1920s, Austin presumably sold the house to Stoneleigh College for Women, a two-year teaching college that was situated in a large, Tudor-style building at the other end of the parcel of land. Stoneleigh used the Austin House as the president’s house, and it has retained the name since. During World War II, the college merged with a school in Indiana and the U.S. Army took over the building, using it as an academy. Janice’s house served as housing for the officers.

After the war, the Catholic Church bought the entire property. The Tudor building became the College of St. Francis, a seminary for Franciscans, and the Austin House became the friary. “The listing said the house had nine bedrooms because the monks made sleeping quarters wherever there was space,” Janice says.

The renovation
When you walk into the front entrance of Janice’s house, you feel thankful that it was spared. It has an aura common to solid, old houses with architectural integrity of holding many stories within its walls, and you can almost hear the echoes of voices from the past.

Janice is keenly attuned to that aura, and her guiding aesthetic as she renovated was to respect the history of the house and what she feels is the sacredness of the space. “In many ways, this house belonged to the community,” she says. “When the monks were here, they conducted a lot of different programs in the public rooms on the first floor—spiritual retreats, marriage encounters, twelve-step programs, and so on. I’ve had people come in and burst into tears because they realize that this is where they attended one of those programs years ago and were spiritually soothed. People have thanked me for saving the house.”

Janice broke up her renovation into two phases. In phase one, she installed a kitchen and removed the existing bathrooms, replacing them with lovely new ones in more appropriate locations, including adding a luxurious master bath.

A granite bath combined with warm wood floors.

She added birch floors where there had previously been glued-down carpeting. She replaced the hundred-year-old steam boiler with a new hot water heating system and retained the old, historically correct radiators. She also added a breakfast room at the back of the home, whose rounded shape mimics that of the turreted front sitting room, a curved deck that leads to a round bluestone patio and water fountain and an entryway off the new driveway.

In phase two, Janice added hot air heat, central air conditioning, and state-of-the-art air purification and humidity control, as well as put on a new roof, added foam insulation, installed a stunning Palladian window on the stair landing for more light and renovated the existing windows throughout the house.

“I saw a process on This Old House where you could modify the original window sashes into state-of-the-art thermopane, and I decided to do that rather than replace the windows,” she says.

Throughout the renovation, Janice was adamant about not fixing what wasn’t broken, although in places she needed to take the house down to stud.

“As far as homeowners go, Janice was the best I’ve ever seen at working to maintain the integrity of the original structure,” says Ron. For example, the house’s first floor plan has four gracious rooms that open off a large main hall; a series of four small rooms—a bathroom, a butler’s pantry, a hallway and an office— compose the kitchen at the back of the house. Janice could have torn down a lot of walls, adhering to our twenty-first-century penchant for space and more space. “But this house didn’t want to be opened up,” she insists, and she kept most of the rooms intact. The result is that she retained the home’s warm personality.

Wherever she renovated, she added more of that warmth. When the painters stripped off the wallpaper in the stairwell, there were marks where molding had been, so she had molding made to match the original trim and re-installed it. In the formal dining room, which had been used as a bedroom when the monks lived in the house, she added paneled wainscoting to match the paneling in the front hall. All of the first floor rooms have different fireplaces, which had original mantles and intact vintage tile surrounds. The hearths had been removed, but Janice was able to find appropriate material to restore them and mimic the original look.

French tiles add character to the kitchen.

In the new kitchen, too, she was conscious of what would fit the house. “It would just look wrong to have the kitchen be too contemporary,” she says, and decided against wall ovens for that reason. Instead, she installed two stoves, one gas and one electric, each with convection ovens and warming drawers. Details such as French tiles, a salvaged schoolhouse blackboard and a cabinet made from doors from the friary add charm. The monks had jerry-built a Dutch door that opens onto a balcony overlooking the back yard, which Janice replaced with a charming, mini-paned Dutch door that looks as if it has always been there. Janice says she loves to open that door while she’s cooking, to take advantage of the sea breezes that blow across the back yard.

Janice’s thoughtful preservation is evident even in the small spaces. In the small vestibule at the front of the house where the monks and their visitors used to hang their coats, Janice left the row of hooks intact. To liven up the wall space around it, she hired Christopher Gurshin, a folk artist from Newburyport, Massachusetts, to create a mural, which pictures what the neighborhood might have looked like in 1895. “Christopher knew the area, and he told me there was a three-hole golf course where the Abenaqui Golf Club is now, so he included that in the mural, complete with players in old-fashioned knickers.”

Upstairs, Janice capitalized on the house’s propensity to be divided into wings—like the first floor, there are many small rooms radiating off a large central hall. At the top of the stairs, there was a sitting room flanked by two small bedrooms, which Janice combined into a master suite.

“Initially, I was concerned that the floor couldn’t carry the weight of a large whirlpool tub, but after they removed the library ceiling and saw how the house was framed, the contractors joked that we could put a swimming pool up there if we wanted,” Janice says.

Two bedroom suites for her children and a family room with an added deck for gazing at the ocean and the stars complete the floor. She had nautical names, as befits a beach house, stenciled on the lintels above the bedroom doors—Captain’s Quarters, North Star and Atlantic Room. “I lived in a beautiful antique house in Ohio, where the architect named all the rooms,” Janice explains. “It’s a charming device, and it helps guests navigate the house.”

On the bright, white third floor, which probably served as servant’s quarters in Charles Austin’s day, there is exercise and storage space, as well as a small room for meditation. “This was the room that the monks called their ‘thinking room,’ and I wanted to continue that tradition,” Janice says.

A custom hood over double stoves serves as a place for accent pieces, while the dutch door brings in the light with charm.

Outside, Janice’s wraparound porch overlooks a property blessed with a fieldstone wall and a collection of beautiful old trees—Swedler maples, lindens, a beech tree, tall spruces and a stunning forty-foot hydrangea that blooms profusely every fall. Janice had a mahogany boardwalk installed over the cement platform that initially led to the house, added some hedges and a few perennial beds and recently built a two-thousand-square-foot carriage house with a second-floor balcony overlooking the front yard.

“The design was inspired by a carriage house I saw on Martha’s Vineyard that was part of a Shingle-style estate from the same era as this house,” she says.

All in all, the house has turned out to be a sanctuary for Janice, who has found solitude and peace within its walls. “I think houses really are metaphors for the self,” she says. “The house and I are both consecrated entities that have been stripped bare and reborn.”

Anne Downey, who has a Ph.D. in English from the University of New Hampshire, writes features and book reviews for a variety of publications. She can be reached at amdowney@comcast.net.

Joseph St. Pierre (www.jsp247.com) provides creative photography and digital solutions for editorial and corporate clients throughout the U.S.

Resources
Fat Cod Plantscape in Stratham, N.H.; 603 773-0122
Christopher Gurshin in Newburyport, Mass.; 978 462-7761
Houghton Builders Ltd. in North Hampton, N.H.; 603 964-3107
Innisfree Designs in St. Augustine, Fla.; 904 824-0476
Key Heating and Air Conditioning in Portsmouth, N.H.;
603 436-8811; www.keyhvac.com
Living Spaces Architectural Associates in Rye, N.H.;
603 964-5180; www.livingspaces.com
Maggie’s Gardens in Kingston, N.H.; 603 772-2519
Janice Russillo in Rye, N.H.; 603 964-5666
Selectwood in Portsmouth, N.H.; 603 436-9663
Site Structures Landscape, Inc. in Portsmouth, N.H.; 603 430-6005
Walpole Woodworkers; www.walpolewoodworkers.com
Window Master in Dublin, N.H.; 603 563-7788
Woodburn & Company landscape architects in Durham, N.H.; 603 868-5949