Beauport House, The Central Hall, Pembroke Room and More

Hi Dear Folk,

This is the entrance hallway area.

The Stair Hall or Central Hall, while not the large hall one might expect at the center of a Shingle seaside house, is an important circulation hub. Sleeper had the room paneled with salvaged interior window shutters, topped with Chinese arabesque wallpaper. Two objects dominate this room filled with books and Americana. A tall cast-iron stove, in the shape of George Washington clad in a toga and mounted on a pedestal, is framed in a wall niche. Across the hall, Sleeper installed a salvaged Connecticut Valley doorway, fitted with shelves and backed with frosted glass, the bullseyes in the sidelight and fanlight frames replaced by Sandwich cup-plates. This unit displays 130 pieces of brown and amber glass backlit by a second-story skylight, its light intensified by a mirror in the pantry beyond.

The largest and most well-known of the Beauport rooms may be the Pine Kitchen or Pembroke Room, which Sleeper added in 1917. It incorporates woodwork, including doors and ceiling beams, from the Barker House (c. 1650) in Pembroke, Massachusetts. Sleeper’s maternal grandmother was a Barker, and the family traced its ancestry back to the builders of the house. The wide kitchen floorboards are from another demolished Colonial house, the Dillaway House in Boston’s North End. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the Colonial kitchen has represented nostalgic American values of hearth and home. As early as the “sanitary fairs” of the Civil War era, reproductions of the Colonial kitchen had been a decorative conceit, most prominently at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. The Pembroke Room is packed with pine furniture, handmade cooking pots and utensils, and serving ware, including a huge collection of redware pottery displayed in two large cabinets. Most of the furniture was vintage Colonial, but Sleeper also commissioned Gloucester cabinetmaker Frederick Poole to construct several pieces. Furniture from the Pembroke Room was featured in Russell Hawes Kettell’s book The Pine Furniture of Early New England, and Sleeper designed pine kitchen re-creations for a number of his clients. 

Paul Hollister, who as a boy knew Sleeper and who co-authored the first book on Beauport, described Sleeper’s use of light in the Central Hall and other rooms without southern exposures:

Beauport is basically an inner-directed house, its sequence of rooms conceived internally, like a series of stage sets. Windows are shaped and spaced as part of a different decorative scheme for each room. Except for rooms on the sunny south and harbor sides, Beauport has few windows that invite the water-bright light. Many are veiled with blinds, draperies, or window shades drawn to reveal painted designs. Other interior windows and glazed doorways spread precious daylight from room to room in the seventeenth-century Dutch manner. Several windows are designed specifically for displays of colored glass. Windows that became blocked by later alterations to the house now hold mirrors that increase the apparent size of small rooms.

Sleeper and Hanson the architect, together found creative ways to diffuse light throughout Beauport’s rooms. His use of light is a most interesting feature throughout the house.

Christine