To The Last Detail

When you buy an old house, you will have to remodel the kitchen. Old houses never have enough storage space. Bachelors don’t cook. Wrong, wrong, and wrong—at least at Sconehenge, David Berman’s 1910 Shingle Style house in Plymouth, Mass. When he bought the place, it needed a level of cleanup and restoration that meant a dumpster was parked outside for months. Yet he didn’t touch the kitchen’s old-fashioned floor plan. In fact, David sings the praises of his original kitchen “suite” as he serves his trademark ginger scones.

- Patricia Poore

The 1928 Glenwood stove is the workhorse as well as the visual focus of the kitchen. It is particularly appropriate: Glenwoods were made by the Weir Stove Co. of Taunton, Mass.; and this 1910 house had a kitchen upgrade by its first owners in 1927. “It’s the original 1910 layout, now with updated, late-’20s and early-’30s appliances and bits and bobs,” Berman explains. The stove has six burners, two ovens, a simmer shelf to hold food just below boiling, a warming oven, and two broilers—one of them vertical.

The vintage stove came from the Antique Stove Hospital in Little Compton, Rhode Island, and was restored at the Stanley Iron Works in Nashua, New Hampshire.

In fact, period appliances set the tone and cutoff date for the kitchen. Also vintage is Frigidaire’s 12-cu.ft. W-12 model made in 1929–30. It came from Antique Appliances in Clayton, Georgia. It began life as a sulfur-dioxide unit but has been converted to use modern refrigerant.

All of its hardware is original (except for the conversion element out of sight below). Originally chrome-plated, the degraded hardware was replated in nickel to match the Glenwood’s trim.

While Berman says the Glenwood works at least as well as a modern range, look closely and you might spy an under-counter dishwasher to the right of the sink.