Curbed: All Posts by Susan HarlanLove where you live2019-07-11T11:00:00-04:00https://archive.curbed.com/authors/susanharlan7357441/rss2019-07-11T11:00:00-04:002019-07-11T11:00:00-04:00The dish store that is my home away from home
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<p>Replacements reminds me of my house—it’s a place made for collectors</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap p-large-text" id="8jc63u">My most recent trip to Replacements, Ltd. was last December 31. I didn’t intend to go on New Year’s Eve, but I don’t like New Year’s Eve—the mandated reflection on your life, the unreasonable expectations for fun—so it’s possible that on this most unpleasant of days, I instinctually made my way to a place I love. I called beforehand, just to make sure they were open, and then I set off for Exit 132 on I-40 East.</p>
<p id="KgUEHk">Replacements sells china, crystal, silver, and dishes, though “sells” hardly encompasses the scope of this fortress of dishes 40 minutes from my home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The store’s total inventory is 11 million pieces. </p>
<p id="gXsFoV">I have been collecting dishes for many years. The pantry off my kitchen is filled with dishes. The cupboards in the kitchen are filled with dishes. The sideboard and china cabinet in the dining room are filled with dishes. My own inventory consists of probably about 60 dinner plates, 80 side plates, and maybe 40 bowls (not counting larger serving bowls). Then there are the very little plates—maybe 25 of those. And another 20 or so very little bowls. And vases. I would say 35 of those. Plus about 45 mugs and 25 teacups, some with saucers. I won’t go into candlesticks. Or platters.</p>
<p id="9Qs21X">I live in a 1920s red-shingled house on a quiet street. I bought the house five years ago, not because I wanted to buy a house (I didn’t), but because I happened to see it one day. It was cute and cheap, and I could see myself in it. But more than that, I could see <em>my things</em> in it. And over the years, my house has become a house of things, a repository of my collections. </p>
<p id="XTTgY2">I don’t collect plates, bowls, platters, mugs, teacups, and glassware because they are valuable. Mine aren’t. They are usually a buck or a couple of bucks each. And I don’t collect them because they are all useful—or even used. I live by myself, and although I have friends over, I don’t throw large dinner parties. Even if I did, it would be impossible to use every dish, as it is impossible for a book collector to read all of her books. And this is a good thing. </p>
<p id="OlcLQN">I collect dishes because they figure so much into our daily lives that they’re almost invisible. Yet many people remember the dinnerware they grew up with. Or their grandmother’s china. Or the dishes at a favorite restaurant. I love how dishes can hold memories and even invoke former versions of ourselves. Almost all of my dishes are second-hand, so they hold both my own memories and the memories of strangers. Sometimes I stand over the sink, washing one of my dinner plates and thinking of all the times I have used it and all the people who have used it before me.</p>
<p id="AfX74W">Many of my dishes are from Replacements, and most are vintage. On this last trip, I bought a blue oval plate emblazoned with TAD’S STEAKS. When I got home, I called the Tad’s Steaks in San Francisco and in New York City, but the plate isn’t from either restaurant. I also bought a stack of mismatched side plates for a dollar each. One is marked “LGH” on the brown outline of a leaf. The unknown histories of these objects add to their charm. </p>
<p id="j31YBv">Of course, Replacements could solve the mystery of these plates. This is one of the many things the store does: identify china and dinnerware patterns. Its 500 most popular china patterns (of 300,000) are on display in the store, alphabetically by manufacturer, as are 150 crystal glassware patterns (of more than 80,000) and 150 sterling, silverplate, and stainless spoons (from more than 60,000 flatware patterns). If you need an object to complete a set, Replacements will have it or can find it. If you don’t know what your pattern is, you can provide Replacements with a piece—the dinner plate for china, a stemmed piece for crystal, the fork for flatware—and the store will research it for you. Replacements repairs crystal and china and restores silver, even forks you have dropped down the garbage disposal. Replacements can also make objects that do not yet exist. If you would like a bacon fork or a mustard spoon that is not available from the manufacturer of your flatware, the store’s water jet machine will do the trick.</p>
<p id="BLnUSU">Replacements made $80 million in revenue last year. It has 400 employees and millions of customers worldwide, more than 80 percent of them online. It buys from manufacturers and individuals, as well as nearly 500 dedicated suppliers. Replacements’ facilities are the size of eight football fields and contain a museum and a discounted room that has the feel of a rummage sale. The store is connected to the warehouse by glass doors, and just beyond these doors are more stacks of dishes. </p>
<div><aside id="DnqNIl"><q>I bought the house five years ago, not because I wanted to buy a house (I didn’t), but because I happened to see it one day. It was cute and cheap, and I could see myself in it. But more than that, I could see <em>my things</em> in it.</q></aside></div>
<p id="cpdipd">I recognize Replacements because it reminds me of my house. Like me, Replacements CEO Bob Page is a collector. He used to collect dishes at yard sales for friends, and he still collects cabinets for the store and the warehouse; one particularly large and beautiful one is marked with burns where people used to rest their cigarettes. </p>
<p id="uD1Qjw">The warehouse shelves stretch far overhead, each object in its place, a small part of a complex system. The newest area has 30 rows, 16 feet high, with two large ladders per row, and 900 of the most popular patterns were moved to this section for shipping efficiency. There is an area for packing. There is an area for overflow. There is an area for inspection, where you can tap a pen on the side of a china teacup to tell if it has a chip or a crack. And there is an area devoted to piles of banana boxes because they are an ideal size for packing dishes: not too big and not too small.</p>
<p id="KjMUFM">There is a section for Fiestaware and another for Spode Christmas china. (Replacements has over 100,000 customers for this pattern.) There is a section for silver that is only polished when it is purchased. The Replacements warehouse is a kind of collector’s paradise because it feels like infinity, and the collector is never finished. We may complete one collection, but there’s always another potential collection, always more things to make our own. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="cV3BYw">We are driven by the sense that something is lacking, and that we can make up for this lack. The things I have brought home from Replacements are not replacements. But the idea of a replacement is tantalizing. A replacement takes the place of something that is missing or lost, and when it does, it takes on the memories of its fellow dishes or glasses and lives among them, in our homes. Replacements promises, among other things, to replace what is lost, to create wholes. I keep visiting in search of not just beautiful things, but a beautiful idea: the impossible promise of wholeness in a world of missing things.</p>
<aside id="H1wJga"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"curbed_weekend_reads"}'></div></aside><p id="AbyshG"></p>
<p id="YfJxAm"><small><em>Susan Harlan’s essays have appeared in </em></small><small>The Guardian US, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Roads & Kingdoms, Literary Hub, The Common, Racked, The Brooklyn Quarterly, The Bitter Southerner, </small><small><em>and</em></small><small> Public Books</small><small><em>, and her book </em></small><a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/luggage-9781501329296/"><small><em>Luggage</em></small></a><small><em> was published by Bloomsbury last March. Her humor book </em></small><a href="https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/decorating-a-room-of-ones-own_9781419732379/"><small><em>Decorating a Room of One’s Own: Conversations on Interior Design with Miss Havisham, Jane Eyre, Victor Frankenstein, Elizabeth Bennet, Ishmael, and Other Literary Notables</em></small></a><small><em> was published by Abrams last October. She teaches English literature at Wake Forest University.</em></small></p>
https://archive.curbed.com/2019/7/11/20688984/replacements-ltd-collecting-china-dishes-storySusan Harlan2015-08-06T13:00:00-04:002015-08-06T13:00:00-04:00How Dolly Parton's Childhood Home Became the Dollywood Empire
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<figcaption>The entrance to Dollywood. Photo by Susan Harlan.</figcaption>
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<p>"Is this the real house?" asks a woman as she shuffles through the cabin, eating barbecue off a red plastic plate.</p>
<p>"I don't know," says her friend. "Is this the whole thing?"</p>
<p>I'm standing in the replica of Dolly Parton's childhood home at the Dollywood theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Visitors enter the cabin on the left, from a front porch hung with old oil lanterns, and exit to the right. A hallway several feet wide runs along the cabin's interior, and a wooden fence and glass wall separate visitors from the two-room home: you are both in the cabin and not in the cabin, surveying a recreation of the space where Dolly lived with her parents and eleven siblings. Several other people walk through the cabin, marveling at its size. One man laughs out loud. "<i>How</i> many people lived here?" he asks no one in particular.</p>
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<br><span class="credit">Dolly Parton's Tennessee Mountain Home. Photo by Susan Harlan.</span></p>
<p>Lack and excess coexist uncomfortably at <a href="http://www.dollywood.com/">Dollywood</a>, where the cabin represents one kind of "Tennessee Mountain Home," and the ever-expanding Dollywood brand another. Dollywood strives to give its visitors a sense that they are at home in the Smoky Mountains, but being at home is about luxury. Those who flock to Dollywood, Dollywood Splash Country, and Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede Dinner Attraction can stay at Dollywood Cabins, which come complete with bedside jacuzzis in the master suites, "picnic pavilions," swimming pools, and home theaters. And in late July, the latest addition to the Dollywood empire opened its doors: the DreamMore Resort. Like Dollywood Cabins, the resort is geared towards families—visitors are encouraged to "Make the Most of Family Time"—but it markets itself as opulent and grand.</p>
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<br><span class="credit">The DreamMore Resort, as a work in progress. Photo by Susan Harlan.</span></p>
<p>The replica cabin, by contrast, strives to give visitors a glimpse into Dolly's impoverished childhood, which underpins the park's nostalgic vision of Tennessee. A sign proclaims it "the original cabin," with its "original family treasures" that "still stands at its location on Locust Ridge." This year—<i>all</i> year—Dollywood celebrates its 30th anniversary, an opportunity for this world of Appalachian replicas to insist that it is "original." This word is emblazoned on anniversary signage throughout the park. The emphasis on originality relates to Dollywood's insistence on its all-American, down-home authenticity, and the fact that the cabin contains "original family treasures" owned by the Parton family makes it difficult to distinguish between the real and the fake.</p>
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The cabin is inseparable from the Great Smoky Mountains. The idea of place is central to all theme parks, which must strike a complicated balance: they should be specific enough to resonate with potential customers and generalized enough to appeal to a wide audience. Disneyland opened in 1955 as a placeless place. Its "Main Street USA" folded all American main streets—already a mythic idea—into a single location that was everywhere and nowhere at once. Some have attributed the failure of Freedomland, which opened in 1960 in the Bronx and was intended to be the "Disneyland of the East," to its geographical specificity. Freedomland was conceived of by Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood, who worked in the planning, construction, and management of Disneyland before a falling out with Walt Disney. The park included zones such as "Little Ole New York," "The Great Plains," and "The Old Southwest."</p>
<p>But Dollywood is absolutely geographically specific, and it is successful. Divided into ten zones—Country Fair, Showstreet, the Village, Craftsmen's Valley, Rivertown Junction, Wilderness Pass, Timber Canyon, Owen's Farm, Jukebox Junction, and Adventures in Imagination—it is a consumable, artificial version of the mountains that lie just beyond its walls. Some theme parks create fantastical worlds, promising the possibility of escape from the everyday. But Dollywood encourages visitors to confuse the actual Great Smoky Mountains with those represented in it.</p>
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<br>[The kitchen. Photo courtesy of Dollywood.]</p>
<p>The cabin stands close to the park's entrance, suggesting that you need to see it before moving on to other offerings. The kitchen walls are covered with floral wallpaper and old newspapers and hung with cast iron pans and enamel mixing bowls. The table is set with plates and aluminum coffee cups. A kettle sits on the stove, and the shelves are lined with earthenware jars, rusted tins, and even a container of Spam. On the floor are baskets filled with firewood and pumpkins, and by the stove are a broom and a butter churn. A washing basin stands between the kitchen and the bedroom, on top of which rests a container that has been turned on its side and labeled "LYE SOAP." The date of 19 January 1946, Dolly's birthday, is circled on a calendar for Ward's Cow-Feed and Pride Hog and Pig Feed in Nashville.</p>
<p>A two-thirds wall separates the kitchen from the bedroom. Lace curtains hang in the bedroom window, and the couch has been pushed up against the bed, which is covered with a quilt that brings to mind Dolly's patchwork "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1zJzr-kWsI">Coat of Many Colors</a>" that she immortalized in the 1971 song:</p>
<p><i>Every piece was small,<br>And I didn't have a coat<br>And it was way down in the fall<br>Momma sewed the rags together<br>Sewin' every piece with love…</i></p>
<p>Two necklaces hang on the wall above the bed, as do several old photographs of her parents. When I sit down on the floor in the hallway, I see that there are wooden toys stored under the bed.</p>
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<br><span class="credit">The bedroom, towards the kitchen. Photo by Susan Harlan.</span></p>
<p>As people pass through the cabin, the refrain is always the same: Look at this; look at that. <i>Look at that jar of buttons. Look at that old stove. Look at that cool sewing table. Look at those plates.</i> But no one stays for long.</p>
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<br><span class="credit">The bedroom. Photo by Susan Harlan.</span></p>
<p>Outside, a sign identifies the house as the "Tennessee Mountain Home" mythologized in Dolly's 1973 song: "These mountains and my childhood home have a special place in my heart. They inspire my music and my life. I hope being here does the same for you! <i>Dolly</i>." This pink signature, which reappears on other signs throughout the park, authenticates and approves this replica as a potential source of inspiration for "you," a key term at Dollywood that draws the visitor into Dolly's story. Another sign by the front porch explains the cabin's genesis:</p>
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Behind the house is a performance space called the Back Porch Theater, and standing outside on one side of the house, I can see where the musicians' instruments are stored. But the cabin is another sort of set. Inside, it resembles a stage before a show starts, silent and empty, everything frozen and waiting to be animated by performers. The recessed spotlights in the ceiling add to this effect.</p>
<p>Perhaps surprisingly, the replica of Dolly's childhood cabin does not fit in its environment. Although Dollywood is certainly about Dolly Parton, the cabin is jarringly personal in this largely generic landscape. The park's gristmills, barns, and country stores are also replicas, but these buildings are types. A barn in Dollywood represents all barns in Tennessee, not a particular barn. The replica cabin is hers—and her family's—and this makes it strange.</p>
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<br><span class="credit">The Dollywood Express. Photo courtesy of Dollywood.</span></p>
<p>The cabin is also odd because it is a copy of a real place that is just a few miles away, tucked up in the mountains. Like Dorothy's house in <i>The Wizard of Oz</i>, it is both an actual home and a symbol of home, relocated where it does not belong.</p>
<p>Most of the buildings at Dollywood contain things that you can buy, from souvenir coffee mugs, magnets, and key chains to old-timey objects like harmonicas, pony sticks, and bags of gum balls. The wares of the working blacksmiths, potters, belt makers, glass blowers, and slate painters in Craftsmen's Valley are all for sale. But there is nothing to buy in the Tennessee Mountain Home. This is, in part, why visitors shuffle though the house so quickly: they don't know what to do if they can't take anything with them.</p>
<p>The cabin's lost and remembered scene of childhood isn't about consumption; it is about nostalgia. Although we tend to think of nostalgia as a desire for the past, the word comes from the Greek <i>nostos</i>, which means a longing for home. At Dollywood, the home is the origin point for how you understand yourself and your life, and so it proliferates.</p>
<p>The next home is in the Chasing Rainbows Museum. Inside the museum, I walk through several rooms of photographs depicting Dolly with other celebrities and then, eventually, I find myself in an attic.</p>
<p>The museum gathers together costumes, video recordings, awards, posters, and albums from her career, but before I can access this, I must return to the domestic sphere. This jumbled storage space is filled with furniture, clothes, paintings, records, film posters, suitcases, mannequins, lamps turned on their sides, and a gramophone: all symbols of Dolly's career success.</p>
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<br><span class="credit">The attic in the Chasing Rainbows Museum. Photo by Susan Harlan.</span></p>
<p>And Dolly herself is there as a ghostly hologram to explain what this attic means. She speaks of the importance of "the memories of all the people who helped my dreams come true." She also compares the museum to "a special drawer" that we all might have: a space that is filled with the detritus of our own memories—ticket stubs, receipts, and what-not. And so the attic becomes a figure for memory itself.</p>
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<br><span class="credit">The hologram of Dolly. Photo by Susan Harlan.</span></p>
<p>In the replica cabin, every family object had its place. But the attic is—like all attics—a disorganized mass of things: a space arranged to look unarranged. Dolly's stories and songs about her childhood emphasize her lack of material possessions, but the attic in the Chasing Rainbows Museum moves away from this, presenting a successful adult version of Dolly, defined by meaningful objects and memories.</p>
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<br><span class="credit">The second replica of her childhood home, with the Coat of Many Colors in the background. Photo by Susan Harlan.</span><br> In the next room, I encounter the facade of yet another childhood cabin. This second replica is simpler than the Tennessee Mountain Home, with only a kitchen stove, a table, and dishtowels hanging on a clothesline. Off to one side, and behind glass, is a cradle in a nursery. Like the attic, this second cabin incorporates Dolly's own stories in voice-over and in panels on the walls: <i>We had two rooms, a path and running water—if you were willing to run get it, that is.</i></p>
<p>Another wall panel describes the beginning of her career:</p>
<p><i>I would sit up on top of a woodpile playing and singing at the top of my lungs. Sometimes I would take a tobacco stake and stick it in the cracks between the boards on the front porch. A tin can on top of the tobacco stake turned it into a microphone, and the porch became my stage. I used to perform for anybody or anything I could get to watch.</i></p>
<p>As she tells a story of a tornado that spared the house after the family prayed, her voice fills the space like the sound of a benevolent god.</p>
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<br><span class="credit">Dolly's Home-on-Wheels. Photo courtesy of Dollywood.</span></p>
<p>Theme parks often present idealized worlds. At Dollywood, this ideal is your childhood home to which you long to return. But you also know that a return is impossible. As I exit the museum, I pass the last of Dolly's homes: her tour bus, or "Home-on-Wheels." Dolly's friends Don and Ann Warden designed the interior of this $750,000, forty-five-foot long bus, and he drove it for fifteen years. It made more than 100 non-stop trips from Nashville to Los Angeles, traveling 600,000 miles over the years. Though it is now permanently parked in front of the museum, it represents transience and travel: life on the road, not a grounded Tennessee Mountain Home.</p>
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<br><span class="credit">Dolly's bedroom and bathroom in her Home-on-Wheels. Photo courtesy of Dollywood.</span></p>
<p>This is the final magical transformation that Dollywood performs: the change of the home not just into memory, like the replica cabin and the attic, but into a moveable and grown-up form. The tour bus represents the achievement of a career that, the park insists, was assured by providence, from when Dolly was a little girl with her tobacco stake microphone in her hand. You should "chase your dreams," she says, but there is a dark side to this. You must also leave your home behind, and success means the loss of it. This home can be copied and remembered, and maybe even revisited, but it gradually recedes from view, miles beyond the theme park, up in the mountains, invisible.</p>
<p>· <a href="http://curbed.com/tags/dolly-parton">Dolly Parton coverage</a> [Curbed]<br>· <a href="http://curbed.com/tags/curbed-features">Curbed Features archive</a> [Curbed]</p>
https://archive.curbed.com/2015/8/6/9933520/how-dolly-partons-childhood-home-became-the-dollywood-empireSusan Harlan2015-04-02T14:15:00-04:002015-04-02T14:15:00-04:00Creating Korner's Folly, 'The Strangest Home in the World'
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<img alt="Exterior of the Folly. Photo courtesy of Michael Blevins Photography." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/kKgocu0zV1IIIr8Pt4smAg2KkwE=/56x0:945x667/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/47929115/kornersfolly1.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Exterior of the Folly. Photo courtesy of Michael Blevins Photography.</figcaption>
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<p id="zTOzID">Built in 1880 and once billed as "The Strangest Home in the World," <strong>Körner's Folly</strong> in Kernersville, N.C. <a href="https://www.kornersfolly.org/">celebrated its 135th anniversary</a> last Saturday. But it is not really a home in the conventional sense. Artist, decorator, interior designer, and "Man of a Thousand Peculiarities" Jule Gilmer Körner conceived of this structure as an entertaining space, bachelor quarters, horse stables, studio and—most importantly—<strong>showroom</strong> for the wares of his Reuben Rink Decorating and House Furnishing Company. </p>
<p id="YpIrJR"> Today, the population of Kernersville is approximately 23,000, but when Körner finished the Folly in 1880, the town was home to 200 people. Heading toward historic downtown Kernersville, you pass the usual suspects of Southern suburban America—CVS, Walmart, Hibachi Grill, Cookout, Biscuitville, and several gas stations—but soon you leave these reminders of the present behind. The Folly is situated right up against South Main Street, as a business would have been in the late nineteenth century, in all its now-anomalous Victorian grandeur.</p>
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<p id="B8xm1G"> The Folly stands 100 feet high, with a "privy," or outhouse, also on the property. It was built with <strong>eight different sizes of bricks</strong>, which were made on the premises. The sheer variety of building materials was only one aspect of the variety that defined the house. From the outside, the Folly doesn't look particularly odd—until you notice its six chimneys. These are the first sign of what will also characterize the interior: endless options, designed to tempt the customer.</p>
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<p id="plpiqW">In 1785, Körner's grandfather Joseph left his town of Furtwangen in the Black Forest region of Germany, where he had been working as a business representative for a manufacturer and dealer in clocks, and moved to the Friedland settlement in central North Carolina, several miles south of present-day Kernersville. He established a business making watches and clocks, ran an inn, and eventually acquired more than 1,000 acres of land that he passed on to his three children—Salome, Johann Frederick, and Philip—when he died at the age of 61. Jule Gilmer was born in 1851, the last of Philip's eleven children. He was educated in art in Philadelphia and set up a business in Cincinnati as an artist and designer, but when his father died in 1875, he returned to Kernersville. </p>
<p id="kG1DGK"> The Folly struck people as odd when it was under construction. The name came from a passing farmer's exclamation that the building would prove to be "Körner's Folly," but Körner wasn't offended—in fact, he loved the name. As with many histories in North Carolina, his is bound up in the tobacco industry, which prepared him to take on the Folly by honing both his appetite for controversy and his advertising skills. For several years in the early 1880s, he painted outdoor billboards for Durham's Blackwell Tobacco Company, manufacturer of Bull Durham products. The advertisements, which were sometimes as large as 80 x 150 feet and appeared on barns, buildings, and boulders all across the country, were known for their anatomically correct bulls, which some found scandalous. Körner seems to have enjoyed this. In fact, he even wrote letters to the local paper, <strong>posing as miffed young women</strong> and demanding the removal of the ads. </p>
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<p id="uXJtIZ">Having advertised someone else's product in the past, he was more than prepared to advertise his own. "Reuben Rink," the pseudonym he had used to sign his bull advertisements, became the name of his interior design business. The Folly would be his ultimate marketing tool. When Körner devised this unique showroom, most of Kernersville's residents would have selected decorating materials from catalogues and printed advertisements. Körner took the catalog and made it a physical space. Where catalogs had transformed the real into representation, he transformed representations back into the real.</p>
<p id="VY83gJ"> His customers were wealthy, and they sought <strong>large pieces to suit their large houses</strong>—not unlike today's suburban consumers who fetishize the space-filling designs of mass producers such as Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware. (Approximately 90 percent of the furniture in the house today is original.) The enormous floor-to-ceiling buffet in the dining room was <strong>built in the room</strong> and has not been moved since. He also stocked the Folly with wallpaper books, fabric swatches, and other materials that customers could peruse. Ultimately, these materials could be compiled into custom sketches, a movement back to representation after the client had absorbed all the options the Folly had to offer.</p>
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<p id="u5N8pC">And the options proliferated. The house had multiple levels and ceiling heights ranging from five-and-a-half to 25 feet. Every doorway and window was unique. Murals were painted on walls, ceilings, and even the <strong>undersides of staircases</strong>. Fifteen fireplaces showcased tiles of different colors and designs by both Körner and the American Encaustic Tile Company in Zanesville, OH (likely ordered from their New York showrooms). The carved woodwork throughout the interior represented Körner's signature patterns that could be arranged in different combinations: roping, beading, and egg and dart. The wainscoting alone contains approximately 10,000 feet of bead molding, all of which was <strong>carved by hand</strong>. Even the utilitarian cellar was outfitted with tile and other decorative motifs, and some of the mosaic patterns on the floors mimicked carpeting or rugs and can also be found on the porches, which were added in 1906.</p>
<p id="gCVRXM"> The reception room upstairs was designed for social events, complete with conversation chairs and corners draped in green curtains to hide canoodling couples. Körner liked to entertain, and welcoming customers into the Folly was another form of hospitality, albeit a more commercial one. The house was peculiarly positioned between the public and the private, and it partook of both. Körner anticipated the customer's desires and attempted to answer them by offering plenitude. <em>Would you like this fireplace? Or this one? Or perhaps something that combines the two?</em> Each room suggested <strong>infinite combinations of elements</strong>: wallpaper, carvings, furniture, curtains, carpets, and tapestries. </p>
<p id="8rafC0"> You feel this infiniteness walking around the house, too—the sense that you could set off in any direction. Located in the center of what is now the foyer, the dining room leads off to several rooms. The house does not rigidly direct movement; it opens up the possibility for seemingly endless wanderings. These wanderings would have been part of the customer's creative process, as he or she was set free in space.</p>
<p id="rm83py"> The Folly represented not only the virtually limitless desires of the consumer, but also Körner's own desires. As a personal space, the house was constantly evolving; it was never finished. He desired alteration, change, dynamism. This took on both major and minor forms. The house was <strong>remodeled twice</strong>—once in 1890 and again in 1906. The central space into which visitors enter today was formerly the carriageway. The stables were located on the right of the home and the original eleven rooms on the left. But when Körner married Polly Alice Masten in 1886, he found that she wasn't keen on keeping horses in the house. The horses were moved across the street, and the stables were converted into <strong>another eleven rooms</strong>, including the foyer, dining room, breakfast room, sewing room, library, long room, and dressing room for Polly. </p>
<p id="lMbRd0"> Today, ghostly cutouts of their children Jule Gilmer, Jr. and Alice Doré stand in the playroom, which was created by dividing the 16-foot high smoking room in two. (Körner was terrified of fire and, despite his background with Bull Durham, only allowed smoking in this room.) He was constantly repurposing rooms or altering them, dividing some—like this one—from ceiling to floor and others from wall to wall. He painted murals and then tired of them and covered them with wainscoting. He shifted furniture from one room to another and then back again. He moved paintings from one wall to another. Today, many of his paintings hang where they did in old photographs, but these images can only capture one moment of the house's existence; he may have changed something the next day. </p>
<p id="QaTSUQ"> In its constant revisions, the Folly was a prophetic embodiment of what would become an important value of the American suburb: the perfectibility of the domestic sphere. But for Körner, that end point was always deferred. There was always something else to change or improve—to keep the horizon of the complete at bay. The antithesis of a showroom in a contemporary department store, the Folly suggests that <strong>decorating and design are never-ending processes</strong>.</p>
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<br><span class="credit">The theater on the upper level, which Polly Körner used for her Juvenile Theater. Photo courtesy of Michael Blevins Photography.</span></p>
<p id="lzLLiZ"> Always absorbing the outside world into the home, Körner also converted the uppermost level of the house from a billiards room to a theater, where Polly ran the Juvenile Lyceum Theater, which she opened in 1896. She taught theater, music, the performing arts, and etiquette to local children in this exquisite garret decorated with murals. Many of the home's murals were painted by Caesar Milch, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Art in Berlin who worked with Körner and lived with the family for 35 years until his death in 1922. His six cherub-themed murals in the theater represented fantastical worlds; Korner's own Dutch seascapes on the staircase were based on his travels in the real world. This combination seems fitting for a performance space.</p>
<p id="lrha1A"> Körner's Folly continues to be a project. A bowl of plastic fruit on the kitchen counter proclaims its refusal to decay, but the house hasn't been so lucky. Its chipped plaster and peeling paint are reminders of the passage of time. After Jule and Polly died in 1924 and 1934 respectively, daughter Doré used the Folly as a summer house, but the house was boarded up after World War II and sat for decades, battered and bruised by the elements. Most of the textiles were lost. Tree roots grew through the foundation and floor of the breakfast room, cracking and shifting the mosaic tile. In the 1970s, the building was almost torn down.</p>
<p id="LwdUI1"> The house is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and receives support from individuals and businesses, as well as grants from private and government agencies. The Körner's Folly Foundation, which was formed in 1995 with assistance from Preservation North Carolina, has a volunteer board of directors and a full-time executive director. The Foundation's offices are located in the non-historic section of another structure on the property: "Aunt Dealy Cottage" (1885), the home of Clara, an emancipated slave who raised Körner after his mother's death and also worked as the family's cook.</p>
<p id="V3Ruki"> Now that the house has undergone several structural updates—a new foundation, new porches, and a new roof—the Foundation is turning to interior work. To restore a house that was in constant flux poses unique challenges. How do you identify a moment to which to return? The period of interpretation selected for the interior restoration is <strong>c. 1897-1905</strong>, when the family was most active and before the children left home. As Director Dale Pennington noted, what is now the Rose Room (one of the bedrooms) was first green, and then beige, before Jule painted it pink for Doré's sixteenth birthday. So the term "Rose Room" only begins to get at the various incarnations of this space. Each room, hallway, staircase, and nook is a palimpsest, still a record of Körner's understanding of his house as a living thing. </p>
<p id="t2NMoV"> —<em>Photo credits: Photo of Jule Gilmer Körner courtesy of Körner's Folly Foundation. Photo of the Körner's Folly sofa by Susan Harlan. Sketch of a reception room by the Reuben Rink Company courtesy of Körner's Folly Foundation.</em><br>· <a href="https://www.kornersfolly.org/">Official site: Körner's Folly</a> [kornersfolly.org]<br>· <a href="http://curbed.com/tags/curbed-features">Curbed Features archive</a> [Curbed]</p>
https://archive.curbed.com/2015/4/2/9974768/the-creation-of-korners-folly-the-strangest-home-in-the-worldSusan Harlan