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:
“There is not any book
Or face of dearest look
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To go into the unknown
I must enter, and leave, alone,
I know not how.”
—Edward Thomas (1878–1917)
“He will not idly dance at his work who has wood to cut and cord before nightfall in the short days of winter; but every stroke will be husbanded, and ring soberly through the wood; and so will the strokes of that scholar’s pen, which at evening record the story of the day, ring soberly, yet cheerily, on the ear of the reader, long after the echoes of his axe have died away.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Surely it is one of the requisites of a tasteful garb that the expression of effort to please shall be wanting in it; that the mysteries of the toilet shall not be suggested by it; that the steps to its completion shall be knocked away like the sculptor’s ladder from the statue, and the mental force expended upon it be swept away out of sight like the chips on the studio floor.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)