Featured Project - Thomas Jenckes House cont'd

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Jenckes House Renovation

OF ALL THE HOUSES on Providence's Benefit Street, I'd most like to live in the Italian villa on the northeastern corner of Benefit and Angell. From that promontory, the Jenckes House peers west across Benefit past the First Baptist Church, over the Providence River into downtown, and south past the "RISD Beach" to the University Club, Carr House, and on down Benefit. What an aerie its top floor must be!

The ground floor of the Benefit Street facade features a portico with three arches upholding an elegant balustrade. Through here clients once entered the law offices of Thomas A. Jenckes, who argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, and served in Congress from 1863 to 1871. Entry to the residence itself is around the corner, on Angell (hence its 2 Angell St. address). You mount to another portico via a double flight of curved steps.
Beyond this is a curved wall that once contained a gateway to a courtyard snaking around an old one-story rear addition, used into the 1980s, I am told, by patients of the late Dr. John C. Ham. The space, into which over the years I had wandered occasionally under cover of dark, was the most romantic part of a house unusually romantic even by the standards of Benefit Street.

Last spring, coming down Angell, I was appalled to find the courtyard replaced by a big hole. Readers may imagine the dread occasioned by this excavation. Clearly, an addition of some sort was to fill the site of the courtyard. Given that for half a century anything demolished was likely to be replaced by the preening ugliness of modern architecture -- and given the prominence of the location just off Benefit -- alarm was the only appropriate reaction.
So, this summer, as the skeleton of the Jenckes House addition arose, the anticipation of such a tragedy crept, week by week, up my spine.
Imagine my relief when it dawned on me that my fears were, in this case, unfounded.

The brickwork of the addition, even in its patterns of discoloration, closely matches that of the original. So do the denticulated bed mold and wide frieze board of the cornice that decorates the roof, and the bold lintels above the windows. Often, even if a modernist addition is not inflicted upon an old building, details such as these are dumbed down, creating an el-cheapo effect not quite modernist in its inarticulate blandness but serving nonetheless to distinguish the new from the old. Not here.

The Jenckes addition isn't flawless. The windows are too small and too few, and their sills lack the brackets upholding the sills on the original windows. A couple of blank stretches mar the south and east facades, caused by its being an elevator/stair tower. These are considerable defects, possibly unavoidable, but given the overall refusal of the addition to knuckle under to the conventional wisdom, regarding new additions to old houses, they are bearable. A new courtyard of stone, with a bridge to parking, is yet to come. Four condos will cost between $1.3 million and $1.45 million each.
So, wonder of wonders, the Jenckes House addition looks as if it was actually meant to be attached to the Jenckes House. That, today, is a rare outcome. The architect is Robert Ornstein, of Arris Design, in Providence. The firm that owns the building and is doing the work -- Parker Thompson, also of Providence -- deserves applause for its architectural bravado.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal's editorial board. His e- mail is: dbrussat@projo.com