Carving a Future

A decrepit homestead was theirs to interpret in Victorian fashion when this couple stepped up to save it (and the barn) from ruin. Now it’s exquisite.

Abandoned, the house had been decaying for years, its fate locked by a family trust. Like many other residents of the Wallowa Valley in Oregon, Steve Arment had been eyeing the Victorian house for years. The east end of the house and south end of the barn, built by Horatio Cole in the 1890s, had been moved a mile by horse and windlass, rolling on logs, to this location by James Haun in 1908. Haun then doubled the size of the house with a western addition, and doubled the barn as well.

Finally, the 10-acre property went on the market in 2013. With his then-fiancŽe Joella, Steve—a well-known woodcarver and artist— did a few walk-throughs. What they found was horrifying. Largely uninhabited since the 1980s, the house was infested with rodents. Pack rats had filled the walls of the Morning Room with nests made from newspaper, toy circus animals from coffee tins, and peach pits. “When I stuck my head into the attic,” recalls Joella, “I saw this writhing mass of bats surrounded by bright green mold. I shrieked and left.” The seller’s agent said: “What bats?”

A 1968 fire in the dining area had gone to the roof, which was patched with plywood; window glass had been shot out by vandals; the parlor fireplace was walled up; the old porch had been replaced in the 1960s by glass sliders.

The couple considered that the house might be too far gone to save, but they couldn’t stop talking about its potential. “The family who owned it wanted to burn it down,” Steve says.

Steve and Joella bid on the house in the spring. Their bat research revealed that maternal bats usually return in early May. The couple had to rush against time to close the deal, so they’d have time to close up all holes in diameter or more before the bats arrived.

“It was pretty exciting,” says Steve, who hauled away two pickup loads of bat debris after the April closing. The Arments became only the second owners since the 1908 move and additions.

As word went out in the community, fam-

ily, friends, and neighbors appeared to help with cleanup and restoration. “Young people showed up and wanted to know how to do things,” says Steve, who taught some of them woodworking and how to use a lathe. At the outset, Joella’s daughter Christina and her nowhusband Cole spent nearly a year living with the Arments to help out. Joella’s son John also contributed time and energy. Steve’s daughter Audrey lived with the couple for a time to assist with many construction and painting projects. “Kelly, the daughter of friends of friends,” says Steve, “was here a year and went on to become a woodcarver and woodworker. Artist Anna Vogel painted the original clawfoot tubs and the scullery window adornments.”

After they opened the boxed-in stair landing, Steve stood looking out through the parlor, dining room, and kitchen for a long time. “We didn’t know at that point what the interior would look like,” Joella says, “but the design came to him as an inspiration right then and there, and he began drawing it, then he built it.”

Handwritten signs warned guests “Danger! Do Not Use!” throughout the house. A woodstove sat in front of the hidden-away fireplace. “I figured there had to be chimney behind it,”

says Steve. He designed the mantel treatment after an 1880s carved mirror from a San Francisco hotel, purchased at a yard sale in Oregon.

The couple, who’d married that August, lived in a 1970s camping trailer donated by friends from May until mid-November, when the house was more-or-less habitable. Friends and family gathered as local monks led a Buddhist blessing of the property. Steve’s artistry, along with his lifetime collection of antique furnishings and oil paintings, joined Joella’s collection and the couple’s do-it-yourself mentality, allowing them to dream and decorate the Willows Homestead.

Joella wanted the scullery, a space behind the kitchen formerly used to store firewood and lawn chemicals, to have an arched entry. The checkerboard flooring, color scheme, and overall design was inspired by Pat-A-Cake, a children’s book by artist Scott Gustafson. Joella’s passion for irises, inherited from her late mother, inspired Steve to carve the flowers on kitchen cabinetry as a surprise for her.

Joella christened a western-addition area upstairs the Curlew Room, after the slender birds with down-turned bills. Steve designed and painted the window adornment depicting the birds.

Now the Willows Homestead is a testament to vision, talent, and perseverance. “The town’s reaction has been very positive,” Steve reports. “People are really happy we saved the house—including the 26 family members from whom we bought it, who consider it part of their family’s history.”

One of the windows in the Morning Room’s bay had been boarded up in 2013; the others were riddled with bullet holes. Shattered glass was everywhere. New mouldings and carvings create a frieze, its plaster fill painted a rising-sun pink. Sky-blue corner ornaments honor the room’s eastern orientation. A collection of “finds,” yard-sale art found for $5 to $100, is on display in the house. The eastern front portion with its cupola-like dormer dates from the 1890s; porch and entry are original. The Morning Room bay is at the right.

ABOVE The main kitchen is semi-enclosed behind a fretworkembellished opening and a peninsula. The custom threshold bridges the difference in floor levels. LEFT Its floors ruined by 75 years of water damage, the kitchen was gutted and rebuilt with carved flourishes.

Steve Arment is in the barn with one of his creations. (clockwise from top left) Cabinets transition to a lady-in-the-moon carving over the scullery door. An old cabinet was restored and painted turquoise. • Arment designed and carved the sinous Art Nouveau fixture, made a mold, and had it cast in bronze. • Canning jars filled with luscious fruits and pickles add color to shelving above a vintage cupboard. • A clock face is embedded in the carved fretwork.

Steve Arment’s mermaidthemed stand for an antique globe is at the center of the library. In the Curlew Room, window adornment depicts the birds. Vintage pine columns with oak veneer, salvaged from an 1880s house in a nearby town, flank the opening between dining room and parlor.