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All Right at St. Matthew's Place
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11307 |
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LIFE
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5 / 1986 |
1,681 Words |
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Rosemary G. Rennicke
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Over the fireplace, a cheery relic of the eighteenth-century home, hangs an electric English sporting print. A horse drawn road coach prepares for its journey, the rearing horses and expectant travelers proclaiming the artwork's title, All Right. "It says, 'We're ready, let's go all is right," instructs Dr. Donald Rosato. That sentiment, an anticipatory glee tempered with confidence, is abundantly familiar to Rosato and his wife, Judy--evident in the country house they have restored, the antique carriages they have collected, the comfortable flair with which they have integrated home and hobby into their lives.
Yet all has not always been right. The satisfaction of an elegant home and prized collection represents the end station on the long road of nursing decrepit parts into a vital whole. It started with a wastebasket.
"I remember practicing a Chopin polonaise on the piano when I was a child," says Rosato, "and glancing at this wastebasket we had that was decorated with a fox hunting scene. Somehow I connected fox hunting with the music and imagined it to be very elegant." So elegant, in fact, that the young man was inspired to chase after local hunts on foot.
Following horses begat riding horses, which begat owning horses. In 1976, after the stable at which he had been boarding his animals burned, Rosato was in the market for a barn. He eventually found one--on a tangled, overgrown wreck of a property advertised as a smart "bachelor's retreat." When the owner refused to sell the massive dairy barn separate from an equally dilapidated stone house, Rosato decided to buy both.
His three sons enjoyed a good laugh at father's folly. The sagging barn roof threatened to heed the laws of gravity, the grounds were spun in a dense web of briars, and the pitiful little house--well, the kindest word anyone could utter, the eighteenth-century native fieldstone structure had endured a noble history, having been built on a 10,000-acre tract granted in 1686 by Pennsylvania's patron saint, William Penn. But years as a rental property, particularly during the psychedelic sixties, left its once-dignified interior painted turquoise and black, among other horrors.
Where nay-sayers saw a scarred skeleton of the past, Rosato saw the bare bones for St. Matthew's Place, as the property was christened in honor of a nearby church. "Fortunately," says the doctor, "most of the original details hadn't suffered permanent damage. The pine woodwork was intact, the old glass windowpanes were in place, the walk-in fireplace hadn't been dismantled. I vowed to have the house 'livable' in five months, 'perfect' in five years." Ten years later, he can be taken as a man of his word: "Perfect" covers it precisely.
Unlike some restorations, the house did not need extensive structural changes. It did undergo considerable cosmetic rehabilitation, however, en route to becoming an English-style "hunting box," a small country estate that gentlemen of yore maintained for their leisure. Though hardly a man of leisure, thanks to a busy private preventive-medicine practice, Rosato and his wife have fashioned a hunting box very much in the manner of his sorting predecessors, who used such rural properties for riding to hounds and housing the accoutrements of
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