She liked the look and now opines that they add heft to her ghost stories: “I can have the pointed pegs lowering down on the grandkids if they are bad.”įrom the start, Anna B. noticed the tips of the pegs pointing down through the beams and decided not to have them removed. The Mitchells fastened the beams with antique wooden pegs. found the bearing beams and joists for the great room in an old Pennsylvania barn.
The late Jim Mitchell of Union built the house with his father, and they incorporated a variety of Anna B.’s eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century finds: door handles, brick hearths, mantels, and painted boards of random widths.
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She positioned the two-story structure so as to facilitate long views, like the one that extends from her front door through the living room and out the back door to Wheeler Bay. designed what she calls a “sail loft”: a simple clapboard house with a wood-shingled roof. Initially, with a limited budget and a desire to complement her mother’s home, an old Cape on a neighboring lot, Anna B. McCoy once said, “If you have a feeling about a thing, it will come down your arm and out of your hand.” Anna B.’s “feeling about a thing”-specifically her fondness for worn objects and her love of symmetry and balance-came out of her head and into the larger world of her home. Her way, as evidenced by the Spruce Head home she built in 1979 and renovated in 2008, owes a lot to the vision of the world that she and her extended family have popularized in the American mind: simple, stark, transcendently lit, and touched with (but not overwhelmed by) color. “Though architecture has always fascinated me, I don’t think I would ever be an architect, because I’m selfish. “I’m really a frustrated architect,” Anna B. But even while she was still, in her words, “tiny, tiny,” she had a fascination with space and with how things get put together. started formal artistic training with her aunt Carolyn Wyeth and eventually blossomed into a talented artist in her own right. Wyeth, but also to the many other painters in the family, including Anna B.’s own prodigiously talented parents, Ann Wyeth McCoy and John W.
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“Everybody in my family paints,” her cousin Jamie Wyeth once said, “excluding possibly the dogs.” He was referring to Anna B.’s uncle Andrew Wyeth and her grandfather N.C. is on one limb of the famous Wyeth family tree. Indeed, it was practically required of her, given that Anna B. That she should be creating such intricate work as a young girl took no one by surprise. She drew elaborate stairs, rooms, and furnishings. She didn’t populate the hideaways with magical creatures, however. She particularly liked his pictures of fairy houses and took to designing her own intricate tree-trunk abodes. to all who know her-was enchanted with Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.