One of the best things ever written about New England was the work of Ada Louise Huxtable. Huxtable, who died at 91 on Monday, was the most influential writer on architecture of her time. She was a New Yorker at heart, but she spent half of every year in Massachusetts, where she had an unpretentious one-story house in Marblehead.
Marblehead is the subject of the Huxtable quote I love best. Writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2011, she was commenting on the work of an architect who designs houses in imitation of the styles of the past. Huxtable wrote that the architect’s historic details were so accurate they amounted to a kind of perfection. “Full confession: I am no fan of perfection,” she wrote. She then used Marblehead to explain what she meant:
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Nice.
Thank you for this reminder about a marvelous woman, and all that she did so preserve our collective New England past. I am old enough to remember all that was being torn down during the past 40 years. Whenever someone like this dies, we all lose something.
As a friend and architect who worked with Ada Louise on her house over the past 18 years I can attest to Robert Campbell's description of her house in Marblehead that, like her description of the nearby historic district, "there is not a perfect thing anywhere..." However this is not to imply that she didn't continually improve the 1958 structure in the "ranch house style" (the subject of her unfinished book) that she and her husband Garth purchased in 1982. Every square foot of usable space was reclaimed, every view of Salem Harbor maximized, every foot of green space cultivated with loving care to the extent that her house was a perfect reflection of her lifestyle and personality. "Love what you have rather than have what you love" was her maxim and that applied both to her house and also her work as architectural critic.