HOUSE TOUR | Hilarious Couple's 200-Year-Old DC Home

so what room is this what we call this the Connecticut room this is the Connecticut where we this is a sort of long extended living room where we were standing before which was the original sort of 1820s part of the house we call that the Massachusetts room because it's sort of more uptight uptight and uncomfortable furniture and sort of Puritan and this is this is like Fairfield County sort of well-to-do so that's how we say if you can't say I'm in the living room because where would you be in that part or in this part and I can't use the word parlors too silly as well people so anyway the couch was was inspired by Napoleon's birthplace in ayakyo which is in Corsica we went there a number of years ago and we we saw this kind of green velvet with this yellow piping and so when we got home the couch needed to be recovered so we copied Napoleon's Boyhood oh and it turns out he wasn't a poor tester he was very well to do the family were very big in this town and Corsica I'm Sydney Lawrence and I'm Tom Burch and this is our house in Georgetown hey Mrs Skippy the dog can we plant a dog yeah I like the dog okay he'll bark otherwise so let's show you around a little bit shall we come on Tom what is your Mantra when it comes to decorating we don't decorate that is our Mantra yeah we don't decorate and we don't we're not mad we don't care about matchy match but things have to be Harmony yeah the harm so I mean there's not I mean there are some colors here which is basically green and blue and red when you get it right there yeah right but we've never hired anyone to um tell us what to do what do you love the most about this house I like the fact that it's old yeah that too and I like this and somebody once said there's not a lot of space that there are a lot of spaces so that um to a thriving adults can get away from each other and have independentness Independence and it's okay even though it's not really a big house but it's a it's a big house in other ways it's just psychologically it's a big house it's really key we can lose each other in this house only Skippy knows only Skippy knows for sure I like something that has a little character to it the rug we're standing on we bought it the bazaar on Istanbul when we travel is we pick things up this table that's right next to us is sort of not only littered with books but there's a kind of a toy horse from Rajasthan um this uh African headdress actually Cindy got it at a free market and this figure of Saint John the Baptist um you got that in Bogota I was on a museum trip getting a work of art back from Melbourne to Washington DC which was great and stopped off in Hong Kong and there he is Chairman Mao I thought this is better than a war hole we each brought a dial tone into the relationship in 1983 there were still more of them around him so it's fine now try try try um calling somebody's home tonight and call my cell phone yeah foreign you can't dial anything anymore at least not in Washington DC because it just doesn't and just as important the telephone company hasn't informed their subscribers that they've taken away a very important service which is to use their old dial telephone there's a disaster theme that runs through here blowing up here in Catania and over here is another volcano blowing up which is Vesuvius which we got in um yeah and then here's um the great same great uncle this is the ruins of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake did This Disaster Wall come naturally or how did this come to be there was no plan no plan everything is a disaster wall but evidently we're drawn to disasters maybe it's because we're from California where they have we have 35 earthquakes and fires blah blah blah blah you know mudslides we're gonna go upstairs as if we're at mathial peel painting go up the stairs like they do in the 18th century of these very steep stairs foreign [Music] pay bills I got interested in arts and crafts Furniture in the 70s and so this is a great stickly chair speaking of steaks there's a stick table here this is like a folk art thing made out of twigs and sticks and stuff now we're going downstairs to the ground floor which is where the dining room and the kitchen are and in the oldest houses in Georgetown whether they're small house like this one or some of the grandest houses it's traditional that's the dining room is downstairs we had a new floor put down yes and when the old floorboards were taken up here they were just sitting on dirt and what we found were of all these artifacts which were which were things like little bottles and a a buckle of some sort and a very terrifying nail that came out of the floor out of the dirt floor of this old uh spoon somebody's spoon everything in this box was buried in the dirt floor of this house and uh we didn't find any bones when did you paint this last year what this is a painting called Adoration of the chocolate child nine months after I was born they took a picture of me on a high chair with a great big can of Ghirardelli chocolate and I'm smiling on them I was gurgling away and the thing about the Ghirardelli chocolate is that my mother was my mother was poly Ghirardelli Lawrence my mother's father was the president of the company when I was a child it was sold from the family in 1961 when I was just so it hit puberty which is a wonderful thing because actually I thought it would grow up to be president of it for a while because it was like I was in line this kind of thing so um I thought I would do this and kind of revisit this funny picture of myself as a kid and out the window you have and it says Cal here I don't even have Berkeley where I wound up going to college you see the rest of the United States looking Eastward and so you have Washington here New York and Boston you have Yosemite and Lake Tahoe you have the Berkeley campus with the Campanile here the idea being that this is what my life would sort of happen with my life later so I'm going to go at that it would have nothing to do with the girly Chocolate Company I would go make my own education I would go to Berkeley I would study the history of art I'd wound up getting a job at the hirschhorn Museum which is in this city and I would travel widely and so there it is so your TV is covered well that yeah because other otherwise it's foreign so it's been great having you here Allison there's a lot to look at and we have a good time talking about it thank you for coming by we'll see you real soon why because we like you I think this is just great thank you so much [Music]

Channel: Homeworthy

Views: 469,958

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Id: 5K6qceRqNzs

Length: 8min 5sec (485 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 12 2020