REIMAGINING the Past

Patrick Ahearn brings 19th-century character back to an 1850s farmhouse.

- Janice Randall Rohlf

A stone's throw from a main commercial street northwest of Boston, an 1850s Italianate farmhouse basks in the serenity of an intimate lot separated from its neighbors by mature trees and hedges. Restrained yet resplendent, the green-shuttered white house with a deep front porch and storybook porte-cochère is endowed both with the reverence of American colonial history and an element of je ne sais quoi that some say only the French are able to conjure. But it wasn't always this alluring.

"Our client wanted to redo a number of things that previous builders had done to the house and try to get it back to the original," says architect Patrick Ahearn, a classicist whose eponymous firm specializes in homes that are sympathetic to the past but conducive to 21stcentury living. "They also wanted to add a European flavor." The wife, an artist, is French and she uses the carriage house, formerly a garage, as her studio.

Bringing 19th-century character back to the four-bedroom abode required "reimagining it as a kind of country house," says Ahearn. "The transformation was dramatic, but we did not have to rip the whole house apart. We really didn't add on to it, we just revised every surface and every space as well as the landscaping." Ahearn has built or renovated a number of houses on Martha's Vineyard, where the owner of the antique has a second home. Calling Ahearn’s ability to restore historical homes “genius,” the homeowner says she wanted some of that “Vinyardesque” flair in her mainland home.