#695 Bringing Back the Colonnade

We've always loved arts-and-crafts colonnades.

Some have a short base cabinet.

And some have a tall bookcase cabinet like this one. 

 

We first discovered our Ozarks bungalow originally had a colonnade separating the living room from the dining room when we pulled up the carpet and found this ghost footprint of a colonnade.

We don't know the height of the original base cabinet but we do know it included a bookcase.  We learned this from a conversation with the granddaughter of the owners who lived here at the time the colonnades were removed during a 1950s 'modernization'.

We consider purchasing a salvaged colonnade from Architectural Antiques of Indianapolis and the measurements will even work - if only those columns were square instead of round.

 

Instead, we decide Kelly will build our colonnade with a short cabinet sans bookcase and Kelly goes to work on the base of the cabinet. 

 

Next comes the cabinet itself with two doors that meet in the middle.

The beam across the ceiling comes next.  The structural beam is now covered with pretty oak to match the cabinets.

The tapered columns are the last and trickiest part.  First, we study cardboard mock-ups of the columns in a variety of sizes and finally decide that the perfect dimension is a 7.5" width at the base of the column and a 6" width at the column top (on the right in the photo below.)  The column on the left is 8" wide at the column base instead of 7.5" and obviously, that is much too wide!

Today, we celebrate the return of the colonnade, different than the 1914 original but just to our liking. 

Yours in colonnading,
Mary