a copy of a Richard Serra. “When I see a painting I like, I have it copied by an artist,” Nealy explains. “It’s just décor.” Woven seamlessly into the modernist aesthetic is an eclectic range of curios and set pieces: a bent-glass table from a retail display case; an antique Hepplewhite side table from Healy’s mother; statuary he picked up in street markets in Indonesia, Burma, China and Japan for a few dollars. The dining-room chairs, designed for a Mumbai residence, accompany a rosewood art-deco-era table. The bedroom contains a French dresser covered in galuchat (sting-ray skin) and a mid-century teak armoire by Harvey Probber. “I like to mix it up,” Nealy admits. What holds the décor together are the striking forms and the pale palette, which doesn’t range far beyond the living room’s two large, gray-toned graphite drawings depicting the overlapping silhouettes of New Jersey overpasses. Perhaps the most color in the room comes from a 200-yearold Chinese vase on the dining table, patterned in pale orange-on-white rather than the usual blue-on-white. The overall effect is, in Nealy’s words, “simple, serene, comfortable and luxurious.” His aim as a designer is equally simple: “So much of life is sad. When you can come home and say, ‘Oh, I love this house,’ that helps people.”
Living room
Am y Li lly
FEATURE 35
K EV I N J . K EL L EY
SEVEN DAYS
Just because a home is good-looking doesn’t mean it’s easy to live in. Consider the case of the former carriage house on Jackson Court, a 50-yard-long block wedged between South Willard Street
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Carriage Return
and Harrington Terrace in Burlington’s Hill Section. The building’s interior has to be one of the Queen City’s most dramatic examples of residential architecture. The Colonial Revival-style exterior is quite striking, as well. Now owned by the Redstone real estate firm, the carriage house was built in 1901 by the family of William Wells, a Civil War general and Chittenden County state
SEVENDAYSvt.com
Photos: Matthew thorsen
Palladian window
senator. An entry in the National Register of Historic Places says of the structure at 192-194 Jackson Court: “Its impressive size and form and elaborate interior woodwork and paneling reveal the intent of the Wellses, who, despite the building’s role as a carriage house, wanted only the finest and the best.” The horses must have been charmed by the 16-foot-high, thick-beamed maple ceiling. And they surely admired the 30-foot-tall, carved-wood spiral staircase that runs from the basement to what was once the hayloft. It is now a spacious master bedroom, where a floor-to-ceiling Palladian window, a skylight and a westfacing window with a lake view provide a glorious glow.
It’s not just the architecture that makes this place historic. Horatio Nelson Jackson, for whom the street is named — and who married into the Wells family — stored his 20-horsepower Winton Roadster in the carriage house after completing the firstever cross-country journey by automobile in 1903. His 63-day drive from Oakland, Calif., to New York with mechanic Sewall K. Crocker is recounted in a documentary film by Ken Burns. So what’s not to like about the WellsJackson Carriage House Complex, as it’s officially known? Quite a few things, says Shams Helminski, a second-year resident at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. He and his wife, Star Pfeil, an emergency-room nurse, have been renting the carriage house since last summer. They don’t seem saddened at the prospect of vacating the $2100-a-month space in a few weeks. “It’s definitely worn around the edges,” Helminski notes as he guides a visitor on a tour. The carpet is threadbare, and the cavernous living room could do with some brightening up. The large, multipaned window that replaced the door where carriages once entered doesn’t quite alleviate the gloom on a cloudy morning. The northern exposure not only requires the occupants to keep lights on during the daytime, but also makes the interior uncomfortably chilly, Helminski notes. When they turn up the heat, the forced-air system makes a lot of noise, he adds. In the kitchen, Helminski points out the marble countertops installed in the 1980s and the rich patina of the original wooden cabinets built into one of the walls at a height reachable only by ladder. A stone wall completely blocks the view from the kitchen’s only window. The building’s handsome exterior would be better appreciated on a recent Saturday if the view from Jackson Court weren’t partially obstructed by the five cars crammed into the front parking area. A pair of attached clapboard homes that flank — and clash with — the brick carriage house further detract from its outside appearance. Also built in 1901, one of these two now-weathered structures served originally as the tack room, while the other was the coachman’s residence. Walking up Jackson Court, a passerby can see the two octagonal domed ventilators on the carriage house’s slate roof. There’s a fixture with poignant implications attached there, as well: a weathervane with a figure of a horse pointing in the wind’s direction. The WellsJackson Carriage House was completed shortly before horses made way for motor vehicles in Burlington and everywhere else in the United States. m