The House With The Beautiful Hat

By Beth Yarbrough

I ran across this photo in my archives, bearing the caption “A sad house on a beautiful day.” Even if this post contained nothing else, that phrase says enough. But sadder still, the photo is seven years old, and yet today the house hangs on, though the deterioration was much worse the last time I checked.

Builders these days lure the masses with hastily constructed pseudo villages and neighborhoods filled with what I think of as “drive-by architectural styling” - houses that seek to replicate the character of certain eras by giving a carelessly designed quick passing nod to the originals, and, for what it’s worth, coming nowhere close.

Meanwhile, the originals slowly die in front of our eyes. The house in this photo lives on the corner of a tree-shaded street in a South Carolina town filled with authentic historic houses. The style is a version of Victorian known as Queen Anne, with trademark towers and turrets that were, and still are, show stoppers - even with their last dying breath.

As I have mentioned many times in posts on this page - the circumstances surrounding such sad sites are varied. Sometimes the decline in unavoidable, due to owners who would give anything to save the structures but are hampered by finances or other extenuating circumstances. And sometimes the owners are long-gone, living hundreds or even thousands of miles away, just paying the yearly property taxes when the bills come due with no thought or care about the place, having not set foot in years. There are cases where groups of siblings own a surviving homeplace jointly, with all but one of the siblings willing to sell while the one holdout stubbornly refuses. And, sadly, there are also owners who just refuse to sell and would just as soon stand and watch a place die out of spite, rather than take steps to save it. That last one will never make sense to me - but it happens more than you know.

I have no idea which situation applies to this house, but I do wish the old girl well. That beautiful tall hat reaching for the sky deserves at least another hundred years of standing ovations. I hope she gets them.