Description:
A Union veteran builds his wife her dream house, Ambleside. A portrait of a feisty widowed Latin teacher moves in. For 130 years House and Portrait share 'their' family and come to love each other. Then in 2010 everything changes.
Brief description: Warren Ashworth is an architect known particularly for restaurant design in New York and Chicago. He is an instructor of design and of architectural history at the New York School of Interior Design, with a special passion for American wood-framed architecture, of which our protagonist is a glowing example. He is also the editor of a biannual scholarly journal of design and material culture called Nineteenth Century, published by the Victorian Society in America. He has worked framing houses, restoring historic houses, and along with Susan, building a timber-framed structure for their son's wedding with the same nineteenth-century tools Simon Peale would have used.
Review Quotes:
A superb book, written as fiction, but filled with real history. Houses contain many stories. Sometimes they can speak and recall their past, their different occupants' lives. We, The House is a remembrance by an Italianate house, "Ambleside," in dialogue with a woman's portrait that hangs on an inside wall. They live through and share many changes: wars and immigration, art and architecture, railroads and inventions. We, the House should be read by all as a moving insight into the American past and the lives of many.
- Richard Guy Wilson, Professor of Architectural History, University of Virginia, author of eight books including Harbor Hill, Portrait of a House, editor of six books, and star of A&E's America's Castles.
I loved getting to know the two protagonists in this book: a Victorian farmhouse on the Kansas plains and an old portrait hanging in its dining room, who discover that although they cannot see each other, they can communicate, in their own anachronistic dialogue. Their conversations reveal much about the people that inhabit the house and the larger events unfolding in their neighborhood and the world. As time passes and the human generations come and go, the house and the portrait bear witness to this warm, bittersweet story of friendship and family ties.
- Karen Zukowski, author of Creating the Artful Home
Warren and Susan visited the Harvey County Historical Museum & Archives in Newton, Kansas where they explored our materials on the Hart and Nicholson families. What they have imaginatively written is a history of the house named Ambleside and the Hart family who resided there. Through the keen observations of a painting that hangs on the dining room wall, mistakenly named "Mrs. Speale" by the family, Ambleside learns Latin and the Hart family history. A restored Ambleside still resides in Newton.
- Kris Schmucker, Curator and Jane Jones, Archivist, Harvey County Historical Museum & Archives
"There's a clever and appealing scheme at work in Warren Ashworth and Susan Kander's We,
the House. On the one hand it gives shape to the notion 'if these walls could talk....' On the
other, with its ghostly wisdom and playful style, it amounts to a time capsule of small-town
Kansas history, one that encompasses many palpable aspects of the human experience,
including language, family, race, religion, endurance, architecture, wallpaper and, perhaps
above all, love and art."
- Steve Paul, author of Hemingway at Eighteen and Literary Alchemist: The Writing Life
of Evan S. Connell.
"A page-turner of a novel which weaves together 18th-19th century architecture, American social
history and a romance so unique and so poignant that the reader will never forget it. To say
anything more would spoil the singular grace of this fascinating and deeply moving story."
- Tom Wilinsky, co-author of the multiple-award winning young adult novel, Snowsisters