The Telegraph-courier. [volume] (Kenosha, Wis.) 1888-1946, 1923-12-06
New Houses Being
Artifcially Aged
Craze for Antiques Spreads
and Builders Turn Out
Synthetic Masterpieces.


\ The fine art Of taking antiquity has
this year. Architects, builders. land
scape gardeners, art dealers and other
caterers to the newly rich have stand
ardized the artificial aging of brand
new house and lot, so that they add
antiquity as easily as they would
coat of paint
It's something like putting the Goa
tar juniper flavor in synthetic gin.
makes the stuff so down a little more
gracefully And real estate men testi
fy that veneer of antiquity, in this
present mood Of the profitser class
will make a $4,000 house sell fol
$50. 900.
Hence the business of purveying an
tiquity to the masses. to readapt a say
ing of Oliver Herford's, offers ricl
rewards to it's novitiates, and the aging
of new houses and grounds not TO MEN
ton furniture and other accessories
has come to rank as a genteel profes
sion. .1s
And the funniest part of It is tina
the whole thing is open and abov'
board. Everybody is perfectly serious
about 1t. Nobody deceives, nobody
deceived. In former years the manu-
sinister thing, with a. grimly humorou
side to It, We smiled at the tales o
oak furniture being given worm
eaten look by having charges Of fin
birdshot fired into 1t, at the same tim'
shuddering a little at the moral OBJ
liquity of the thing.
But there's no moral obliquity abou
the "antiquing' of houses and grounds
and nobody sees any humor in 1t. Muci
less does anybody detect in the proceed
ing a mordant flavor of irony Boti
buyer and seller are as innocent a
babes. The former wants antiquity, an
since real antiquity is not to be ha'
he'll be satisfied with imitation an
tiquity, to match the grimy ancestra
portraits he has just bought at al
auction room.
AS for the seller, he knows tricks
for aging a brand new profiteer's man
sion 500 years in five days. The latest
tendency In real estate circles, however,
is to build and age the mansion on
speculation, and then put UP a For
Sale sign and wait for the heaven
sent profiteer to come along.
It's amusing to see the process In
operation. An observant commuter In
a millionaire suburb reports that he
has been vastly entertained this spring
by the rapid apparition in his neighbor-
hood. as by the magic art of Aladdin
with his wonderful lamp, of an ancient
Spanish villa, garmented with clinging
cypress trees and environed with paved
and grass grown paths in which Don
Ouixote might have walked.
When he first saw it two or thres
months ago, a rising skeleton OF raw
lumber, echoing with the hammers OF
carpenters, there was no indication that
1t was destined so soon to become an
ANTIQUE, dreaming among the trees on
its.splendors and romances of past cer-
turtles. Indeed, it had the air Of ex-
pecting to become a summer hotel.
Growing Old In Day.
But transformation awaited it when
the carpenters had taken their hammers
away. Then the crude skeleton took OF:
q garment OF pink stucco, rough finished.
And then great wagons arrived from
the tree nursery, laden with tall ard
slender expresses, or conifers sufh-
GENTLY like expresses to play that ro-
mantle part. When they mad been
planted here and there against the cora!
pink walls the place began to glow be-
tween the trunks Of the elms With the
hrooding and unearthly atmosphere OF
a Maxfield Parrish painting
Sods Of growing grass were squeezed
into the interstices of the deliberately
irregular fiat stone slabs of the garden
paths, that they might appear to have
the benediction of centuries. And, To
beguile the eyes Of prospective buyers,
the conservatory was hastily stocked
with growing things from the woods
sumach trees, ferns, jacks in pulpits and
what not