The renovation is due to be completed by July 1998, in time for the centenary of Lewis' birth, says the Rev. Toni Luck, an official of the Redlands, Calif.-based C.S. Lewis Foundation, which is behind the project. The U.S. connection in this project is only natural. Lewis' wife, Joy Gresham, whom he married in 1957, was an American from New York. The C.S. Lewis Foundation has a mailing list of about 15,000 people. Each year it mails out information about plans for working on The Kilns.
Volunteers pay their own way to England.
Early on, she says, the house and grounds were completely decrepit. The hedges had grown up to about 15 feet. Since then, the volunteers have replaced the roof, stripped the kitchen, cut down trees, replanted the garden, restored the fireplaces and done most of the major structural work. Interior decorating will be completed next summer. The goal of making the house genuinely Lewisian posed a unique challenge, says C.S. Lewis Foundation president J. Stanley Mattson.