 |
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
  |
|
|
|
|
|
|
When Bob and Cynthia Safrit of Beaufort, N.C. decided they wanted a new house, they had the unique opportunity to create a dream home that combined their own stylistic preferences with the history of both their family and the old seaport in which they live.
A Bit of History, Modern Convenience and a More Open Floor Plan The Arts and Crafts style home is within a rock’s throw of Safrift’s, and it’s flanked on either side by two of the three remaining houses built for those mill workers back in the early 1930s. Bob, a landscape architect with his own firm, Safrit Brothers Inc., designed the house, and while it sticks out a bit among its 70-year-old, roughly 1,000-square-foot neighbors, there’s enough similarity—the hipped roof and porches—that it doesn’t stick out like anything close to a sore thumb. A very pretty thumb, maybe. That was important to Bob.
“The house we had been in had a lot of small rooms. We wanted this one to be more open, and I might have gone too far with that. But to be honest, it turned out even better than I had imagined it would. In fact, we just moved in, and it’s so nice that I kind of feel bad walking around with shoes on because I don’t want to mess it up.” The Arts and Crafts Style
The Arts and Craft style was perfect for what the Safrits wanted. The Arts and Craft movement was a British and American aesthetic movement occurring in the last years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century. Inspired by the writings of John Ruskin and focused on pride in true craftsmanship, it was a reformist movement that influenced British and American architecture, decorative arts and even cabinet-making. In America, according to Bob, It probably peaked in the 1920s and 1930, and still thrives in some neighborhoods in urban centers.
“Though the spontaneous personality of the designer became more central than the historical “style” of a design, certain tendencies stood out: reformist neo-gothic influences, rustic and “cottagey” surfaces, repeating designs, vertical and elongated forms. In order to express the beauty inherent in craft, some products were deliberately left slightly unfinished, resulting in a certain rustic and robust effect." “Arts and Crafts homes," Safrit said, "tended then, and still tend now, to be bungalows, not great big houses, with tapered columns and lots of woodwork.” A Craftsman Style Home The Safrit home certainly fits that description. The first thing one notices upon approach is the columns, which have a brick base but end as tapered white wood columns. The porch is bounded by white pickets, which were hand-cut and the result of a synthesis of styles the Safrits viewed in travels to three states. Then there is the front door, which, although fiberglass, looks for all the world like wood, and bears the typical Arts and Craft attention to detail , with lots of attenuation and a bronze, rubbed-oil door knob, like the other fixtures in the house. Continued... The full article appears in the print edition of North Carolina Coastal Homes & Design magazine.
|
|
 |
[The magazine of Fine Homes, Interior Decorating & Design, Home Building & Architecture,
North Carolina Coastal Homes & Design magazine is published quarterly and is a publication of Copyright © 2007-2008 Sea the Coast Publications, Inc., All rights reserved.
Web Design by ART2IMAGE
|
The result is a stunningly beautiful mid-sized, 2,100-square-foot home—certainly not just a “house”—that occupies a lot on Bel Aire Street that once was the site of a home lived in by workers at the lumber mill that preceded Safrit’s Building Supply, the family business now owned and operated by Leonard Safrit, Bob’s second cousin.
“What we were going for was something that would be a modern house, but one that would honor the history of Beaufort, Beaufort being the town that it is.” he said when photographer Clinton Willis and I visited in late February. “It’s history, but it’s not just family history. Beaufort is all about history, and that was important to us. And we also wanted to show that you could have a really nice house without having it so large that it looked out of place, which some new houses do today. And we wanted it to be comfortable, of course, and relatively simple."
According to Wikipedia, “the Arts and Crafts Movement began primarily as a search for authentic and meaningful styles for the 19th century and as a reaction to the eclectic revival of historic styles of the Victorian era and to ‘soulless’ machine-made production aided by the Industrial Revolution. Considering the machine to be the root cause of all repetitive and mundane evils, some of the protagonists of this movement turned entirely away from the use of machines and towards handcraft, which tended to concentrate their productions in the hands of sensitive but well-heeled patrons.
