Athenwood, located at Montpelier in the U.S. state of Vermont, was the home of Thomas Waterman Wood (November 12, 1823 – April 14, 1903), American painter and native of Montpelier.
Wood built the house in 1850–1851 and named it Athenwood for his wife, Minerva Robinson Wood. (Minerva was the Roman goddess of wisdom, and Athena was her Greek counterpart.) Located at 39 and 41 Northfield Street, the house and studio are private residences.
The wooden house is built in the Carpenter Gothic style, a part of the Gothic Revival architectural movement of the 19th century. Wood designed the house, and was likely influenced by popular pattern books circulated by A. J. Davis and Andrew Jackson Downing. Living for a part of the year in Boston, Wood built Athenwood as a summer home and workplace. The house was faced in shiplapping, and the windows, eaves, and porches trimmed in cut wooden patterns like upended petals, running grape leaves, and ivy. Trained as a cabinetmaker, Wood may have carved the wood trim himself. A small balcony on the east side of the house, entered from the second floor, has elaborate Gothic balusters. In the current use as a private home, some of the original furnishings, including two small marble busts of Athena, remain in the parlor.
Later, about 1880, Wood built a separate studio building just northwest of the house. It too is built in the Carpenter Gothic style but includes influences of Italianate architecture.
Famous quotes containing the words thomas, wood and/or studio:
“Where he swings in the wind and rain,
In the sun and in the snow,
Without pleasure, without pain,
On the dead oak tree bough.”
—Edward Thomas (1878–1917)
“After sitting in my chamber many days, reading the poets, I have been out early on a foggy morning and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Again and again, I struggled though the storm. Once I fainted—and it wasn’t in the script. I was hauled to the studio on a sled, thawed out with hot tea, and then brought back to the blizzard, where the others were waiting. We filmed all day and all night, stopping only to eat standing near a bonfire. We never went inside.... The blizzard never slackened.”
—Lillian Gish (1896–1993)