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Magazine

Fall Home & Design: Frame of 18th-century Connecticut house becomes an antique yet modern home for Potomac family

By Jura Koncius,September 21, 2012

: This old frame: A modern home with history:Couple resurrected an 18th-century… (/ )

On a meandering woodsy lane in Potomac, past a 1950s ranch and a couple of McMansions, sits a barn-red house with a cedar shake roof that looks as if it belongs to an 18th-century New England village.

It does.

The main section of the shingled home is actually the frame of a 1790 Colonial Connecticut farmhouse. An adjoining new wing that echoes the Colonial style seamlessly adds more living space, storage and a garage.

Inside, five fireplaces, weathered oak beams, wide-plank wood floors and hand-wrought door hinges create a warm setting for graceful antiques — tavern tables, four-poster beds — some of them family heirlooms. The rolling green property, called Chestnut Hill, is enclosed by stone walls and white fences, and includes a small barn and a guesthouse, both painted the same warm brick-red color.

At Chestnut Hill, Jim and Linda Hobbins have curated an 18th-century backdrop for 21st-century living. Jim, 70, a historian and retired Smithsonian official, and Linda, 67, a flower designer, raised five children here, adding their own family lore to the historic structure that they rescued and repurposed.

Growing up here was a blast. “It was a wonderful house full of character and unique furnishings. Some of my fondest memories have to do with ponies and dogs,” says the youngest Hobbins, Emily, 31, now a Washington lawyer. “It was a little girl’s dream.”

While their playmates may have had wall-to-wall carpeting, Disney comforters and traditional doorknobs, the Hobbins kids, four daughters and a son, were raised with braided rugs and handmade quilts and wrought-iron door latches. They ate dinner on a 200-year-old sawbuck pine table, hung their jackets on a Shaker pegboard. Two antique clocks struck every hour on the hour; Jim calls them “the heartbeat of our home.” Tin sconces gently illuminated the rooms.

Other kids were always amazed that the Hobbinses’ stove and fridge were hidden from the rest of the kitchen, behind a pine batten door. “Friends would ask, ‘Where is your refrigerator?’ ” recalls Susie Hobbins, 40, the oldest sibling and now a psychiatrist in Pittsburgh. She remembers the frame unfolding from a pile of old beams. “The house was always so special to us. It kind of grew with the children, and my parents have moved along with it.”

Today, Jim and Linda share Chestnut Hill with two cats and a Saint Bernard. When the second generation comes over, some with their own spouses and children, they never know where they might find the Portuguese side chairs or the red tartan camelback sofa. “My wife’s idea of cleaning is to rearrange the furniture,” Jim says. “It moves every week.”

Linda says rearranging brings new energy to a room. “It’s also my way of making the old have an air of new.”

* * *

Jim Hobbins always felt the pull of American history. He grew up in a Montclair, N.J., house full of period furniture collected by his mother. “My parents had a Williamsburg Colonial-style home. When you walked in, you could smell history,” Hobbins says. “Clearly, I got my inspiration from what [my mother] was doing.”

Jim received degrees in American history from Cornell and Temple and joined the Smithsonian in 1967 to work on the papers of the institution’s first secretary, Joseph Henry. He then became special assistant and later executive assistant to four Smithsonian secretaries, working on budget, personnel and policy matters, and serving as their liaison to the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents. He also became director of the Smithsonian’s first two historic buildings, the Castle and the Arts and Industries Building. He retired in 2007 after a dispute over the proper procedure for handling transcripts of a regents’ meeting. To honor Hobbins’s 40 years of service, the three ottomans in the commons of the Smithsonian Castle were named after him. Since his retirement, Hobbins has spearheaded an effort to select and fund a qualified historian to write the history of the Smithsonian and co-founded the Smithsonian Alumni Program.

History continues to be a passion. Note his current beside reading: “Founding Rivals: Madison vs. Monroe” by Chris DeRose.

Linda, one of eight children, was raised on a farm near Wheelersburg, Ohio, and often rode horses. Her father was interested in flowers and gardens. After graduating from Eastern Kentucky University, she came to Washington to work for the Red Cross and met Jim at a party in 1969. They married in 1970.

“I used to think antiques were stuffy and uninteresting,” Linda recalls. “But when I came to Washington, I went to the Salvation Army and got a wingback chair and a Victorian dry sink.”