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Napa's Vintage Import

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By James Hamilton photography by Bob Swanson

THIS IS THE STORY OF A VERY OLD HOUSE that died in an English village and was reborn 6,000 miles away on a hillside above a vineyard in Napa, Calif. In its new life it is called Toad Hall.

The house was built in 1480 by an affluent wool merchant in Glemsford, county of Suffolk, before Columbus set forth on his first voyage to the Americas. A building boom was going on in Suffolk to house the powerful new class known as gentry, which was emerging from an antiquated feudal system and assuming its place in English society. Indeed, hundreds of timber-frame houses like Toad Hall were popping up throughout rural Britain. They were built to last, and many of them did—so many, in fact, that as early as the late 19th century all manner of Societies and Councils and Trusts were formed to preserve them as historic properties.

Not all survived, of course, and Toad Hall did not. Through the centuries it suffered the indignity of neglect and became, in just one generation, the home of an impoverished tinker, a barracks-like house for as many as 32 people, a warehouse, and finally a chicken coop. The wooden soleplate developed rot, and the house began a slow death from the ground up. In 1978, local authorities condemned the house, and a well- known timber framer named Tom Webster dismantled it.

The bones of the old house were stored in a barn in Suffolk for several years before ending up in the hands of an American couple, Mike Reid and Linda Donley-Reid. They lived in Suffolk in the late '60s and early '70s during the Vietnam War, when Mike, a doctor in the Air Force, was stationed at nearby Bentwaters Air Base. They both fell in love with Tudor architecture during this period and talked endlessly about the possibilities of buying either an old barn or a timber-frame house and transplanting it to California, where they were from.

In 1983 the couple returned to Suffolk for three weeks while Donley-Reid worked on her dissertation for a Ph.D. in ethnoarchaeology at Cambridge University. To stay out of her way, Reid, on vacation, did some legwork on the details of buying an old barn, assuming that the red tape in acquiring a timber-frame house would be insurmountable. He knocked around the countryside for days and then, by sheer coincidence, heard that the timbers of an old house were for sale. An American whom Reid had known in the Air Force was unloading them because of an impending divorce. Mike took them off his hands for $20,000 and made them a surprise gift for Linda.

More than 10 years would pass before the skeleton of their dream house, all 30 tons of it, arrived at the port of Oakland in two containers, after a rough crossing of the Atlantic and passage through the Panama Canal. The containers were trucked to the couple's land in the Napa Valley, 45 miles north of San Francisco, where a gifted young timber-frame craftsman, a native Alaskan named Leif Calvin, was waiting for them. It was up to him to somehow put the house back on its feet, to restore its soul. The timing couldn't have been better. He was in love with his craft and had just gotten back from his honeymoon in England, where he and his bride had toured the country looking at tithe barns (in which farmers stored their church-tithe bounties) and houses of medieval design like Toad Hall.

He'd spent a couple of months on the job sweating out the plans for the foundation before the timbers arrived. Then it took four days and a crew of three, with forklifts and heavy trucks, to haul the timbers up to the site.

"When we got to the site, there wasn't much reflected in the plans they had sent from England that we could actually do," Calvin told me. He spent hours on transatlantic phone calls with timber-frame experts in England about where to match up the placement of the anchor bolts and tie-downs before the concrete was poured. The major concern was earthquakes: They aren't a problem in England, but they are in California. That meant "coming up with new details to satisfy . . . seismic requirements," Calvin said. "Issues like lateral loads." William Clement-Smith, who worked for the British company that had prepared the timbers for shipment, flew over to lend a hand. The company had tagged and numbered each timber and had cut up to a foot and a half of rot from the studs. The company also provided a new soleplate and made the mortise cuts. Calvin then chiseled the ends of the studs into tenons to make the fit.

A licensed wood grader was required to judge the safety of the timbers, but he refused to even look at wood of such age. So a test was devised to determine structural soundness by probing the weathered timbers with a screwdriver to a depth of three to five inches.

The timber itself went up in just 10 working days. Strengthening the structure for earthquake safety undoubtedly made Toad Hall the heaviest timber-frame house per square foot in existence, Calvin says. "There are over 2,000 pounds of steel retrofitting devices in the house, all but two of which are concealed from the eye.

" The roof was also a special challenge—how to tie an old roof "to the technology of modern roofing," as Calvin put it. Many of the rafters were badly bowed from centuries of load, so it was difficult to provide adequate nailing surfaces for the plywood diaphragm; to achieve a flat roof plane, each rafter had to be custom cut.

"Every day we had to come up with something creative," Calvin said. "It was like building a tree fort and getting paid to do it." Dealing with the spaces between the timber studs, called infill, demanded an especially creative approach. In medieval times this are was plastered over with wattle and daub—a mix of clay, straw, mud, and even cow dung. Because no two of the timbers were of the same size (the house is not plumb), Calvin had to devise a way to scribe each panel of lath board and plywood to fit each space before plastering could begin, an enormously time-consuming task.

Amazingly, the project's brain trust of engineers, county building inspectors, and contractors all worked together in harmony to meet seismic and building codes. Reid was the reason the transplant took place, but he knew his wife would pull off the construction. She was apparently the real general contractor for the 3,000-square-feet house. "Her drive and passion for the project were amazing," Calvin says.

"I ran it like an excavation," says Donley-Reid, who is currently a consultant for one of the most important archaeological digs of the century, a 9,000-year-old site in Turkey. An independent, adventurous woman, capable with her hands, she worked in East Africa for many years with Richard Leakey establishing regional ethnographic museums in the Kenyan village of Kitale and on Lamu Island, just off the coast. She also bought and restored, in partnership with a photographer, Carol Beckwith, an 18th-century Swahili trader's coral house for use as a private residence. She has a passion for domestic architecture as a way of reading the past thoughts and feelings of a people. Now she brought all her energy and academic discipline to bear in the restoration of Toad Hall, a name she and Reid chose from Kenneth Grahame's classic tale, The Wind in the Willows.

She devoured volumes of books on medieval interiors; she did research at the British Museum so thoroughly that she was able to replicate the floor tiles from a c.-1480 house in Bristol; and she brought in 57 leaded-glass windows and authentic period furnishings collected during her years in England. She even had a moat built and acquired four geese to help control the algae.

THE HOUSE TOOK ME BY SURPRISE. I have to admit that, before my first visit, I expected to find it a little too quaint for my tastes, maybe even self-indulgent. But it most certainly is not. The house is warm and livable, the scale is quite human, there is no sense that it's meant to be a conversation piece. Toad Hall is, however, to echo Donley-Reid, "playful." Each room has its own charm and character.

On my last visit to Toad Hall I had the place to myself for a couple of hours, breathing in its history. I imagined running into a Pilgrim or two here; after all, the house was built before they made the journey to America, and many were form Suffolk and had probably lived in houses like this one. I remembered Linda telling me about her anguish after they had bought the timbers but were not sure they would ever have the means to see the house built. "I'm not a religious person, but I almost prayed several times that nothing would happen to me until it was built," she had said, recalling nightmares that the ship transporting the timbers from England would go down at sea.

A walkway above the hall connects the two ends of the house, both of which are two storied. Browsing this catwalk is the perfect vantage point to get a feel for the character of the house and for the ancient timbers and beams, many of which are bowed and grained with tiny wormholes; it's impossible not to stroke them. Leif Calvin said he found old bits of plaster and horsehair in some of them. And here you can get a close look at the ancient, diadem- like crown post that supports the 30-foot ceiling, exactly as it did 500 years ago. The beauty of timber-frame houses, of mortise and tenon joinery, is that you can feel all the parts pieced together in flowing unity, the pegs contracting and expanding with the weather to give the house an elasticity, yielding but never breaking. When the Germans bombed the English countryside during World War II, these tough old dwelling places shivered before the onslaught, then settled back down.

Despite her strong emotions before the house was rebuilt, Donley-Reid does not seem to have the slightest proprietary feeling. "I truly feel like we don't own it," she says. "We just gave it back its life."

Mortise and Tenon Joint