132 ★ HillRag | October 2010

TOP: The Heurichs were very rich and these are some fi nishes in the vestibule of their Dupont Circle 32-room mansion built 1892-94. The fl oor is a marble mosaic and above the baseboard is a pressed panel. Today a pressed and patterned material is available that, when painted, can look like this or like Lincrustra.

ABOVE: This fl oor is in the Heurich Mansion’s conservatory and could easily be recreated us-ing modern quarry tiles. All photos by Judith Capen.

ABOVE: This is a sketch I made years ago of one of the fl oor tile patterns in the Arts and Industries Building, which was built quickly and economically to house exhibits from the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia so it got a relatively simple fl oor. This section is an expanded octa-gon-and-spot. It could be recreated today using quarry tile, possibly even stock tiles. Sketch by Judith Capen

RIGHT: An ad from an architectural magazine for tile that is a “recreation of a traditional encaustic appearance.” In-terestingly, still from England.

Q. We plan to renovate the vestibule in our Hill row house but don’t know what

is appropriate. Could you recommend resources? ~Air Locked

A. I hope the rest of the story is that your original vestibule was remuddled in horrible ways (fl ocked wallpaper? Yellow ‘50s bathroom ceramic mosaic tiles? Pop-corn plaster? All, sadly, seen in Capitol Hill vestibules…) and you would like to return it to something more appropriate to the rest of your gloriously intact house. If you’d like a modern and edgy vestibule, the following advice doesn’t apply.

(You do need a building permit for

the work, but unless it involves exte-rior work it won’t have to be reviewed by “Historic Preservation,” the Historic Preservation Review Board, since DC Law 2-144 (1978) applies only to the ex-teriors of buildings in historic districts.)

Th is question was sent to the Capi-tol Hill Restoration Society and was well answered by Nancy Metzger, Chair-for-Life of the Historic District Committee, Board Member, Volunteer Extraordi-naire.

Nancy suggested fi nding similar houses with vestibules that look good and/or you admire “…often visible through the front glass doors. It takes a bit of nerve but if you drop a note

Vestibule Bluesby Judith Capen, RA

Ask Judith?

capitalcommunitynews.com ★ 133

through the mail slot and ask, people are often willing to invite you for a closer look and tell you what they know.

“Go on house tours and see what’s out there in historic houses—what tiles were popu-lar among the Victorians, color combinations, etc…there were many enticing ones.

“Write to the Hill Rag’s “Ask Judith” and ask for her thoughts (by the way, her offi ce has a lovely little vestibule with original Victorian tile).

“Finally, if your renovation includes new tile on the vesti-bule fl oor be sure that the sub-fl oor has no ‘give’ as the tiles will crack under weight.”

Nancy’s advice is good: one of the very best ways to research original designs in Capitol Hill houses is looking to the neigh-bors: next door, down the block, or among the 8,000 contributing structures in our historic district. Lots to look at.

I call this on-the-ground re-search methodology. Buildings like ours rarely have a paper ar-chival record. Ours are the 19th c. equivalents of the houses the people who built the pyramids occupied. Th erefore, hours in archives with primary sources is unlikely to yield much. Instead, all of the Victorian-era build-ings of Capitol Hill, Washing-ton, and the rest of the country provide an amazing record that can be reverse-engineered for your house.

Our vestibules typically had ceramic fl oors that Capitol Hill builders called “encaustic” tile, even though technically it isn’t encaustic. (Since people around here have called these tiles en-caustic for a century we’ll accept the terminology, even if fl awed.) Th e elaborate designs worked into these tiles with colored clays made the decoration more durable than glazing. But some fl oors were just solid colors laid in complex patterns. Th e British company, Minton, was a major manufacturer of these tiles sup-plying the encaustic tile in the 1850s House and Senate wing

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134 ★ HillRag | October 2010

“extensions” at one of our neigh-bors. Th ese Minton tile fl oors are wonderfully intact in the Senate wing. Too bad we don’t have a Senator who can get us in to look at the fl oors….

Another building with en-caustic tiles is the 1881 Na-tional Museum Building (now Smithsonian Arts and Indus-tries Building) built to house the wonders of the Centennial exhibition from Philadelphia. It was designed by prolifi c 19th c. Washington architect Adolph Cluss, also architect of our Eastern Market, and has char-acteristic late-ish Victorian tile work. Closed for now but we can hope.

Th e easiest encaustic tiles/high Victorian fl oor to see is in the Reynolds Center, aka Smithsonian American Art and Portrait Gallery. Visit the top fl oor keeping your eyes down. Th e building, begun in 1832 during the dominance of classicism and the Greek Re-vival style and extended in the same vein, suff ered a serious fi re on its top fl oor in 1877, which was then renovated by Adolph Cluss in what he called “High Renaissance,” including en-caustic fl oor tiles.

If you Google “encaustic” you will fi nd companies that make “encaustic” or similar tiles, today. Also, a lot of salvaged his-toric tiles are to be had through the Web, a resource not avail-able to me 22 years ago when we were working on the vestibule Nancy mentioned.

Actually, our building only has some of its original Victo-rian-era tile. When we bought the very neglected row house some of the wall and fl oor tile was missing.

I found a curious tile em-porium on Eighth Street north of Mount Vernon Square called Edwin Ellet Tile and took tiles from our vestibule there. Th ey directed me to the back, a se-ries of open sheds with disin-tegrating cardboard boxes of salvaged and new tiles where I was actually able to match some

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very strange glazed border tiles from our wainscot. I wasn’t able to match the sheen of the yel-low fi eld tile. So we reinstalled all the salvaged tile on the more prominent wall while tiling the other wall, capped with the ap-propriate border, in a matte fi n-ish yellow tile that matched size and color, just not gloss.

On the fl oor, modern quarry tile, the same stuff used in our Metro but in tan, cream, and dark brown colors, was a surpris-ingly good match for the miss-ing encaustic tile.

It can be done but like so much restoration our vestibule was a labor of love and tedium. I continue to think it worthwhile, especially now that it passes the fi rst look test.

Our vestibule has fl at plas-ter above its tile wainscot. But if you look around, you may fi nd vestibules with lincrusta, beaded board, or even elaborate wood paneling.

Th e outside and inner doors are more than half the vestibule’s wall surface so consider them, too. I hope you have your origi-nal doors because they are so hard and expensive to replace appropriately. (Take a look at my May 2009 Rag article on exte-rior doors…)

Nancy’s practical advice about the stiff ness of the sub-strate under ceramic tile is spot on. If ceramic tile, a very stiff material with no give at all, is in-stalled on a surface that moves, like our wood subfl oors, it will crack. If the tiles are small they won’t break but the grout be-tween them will crumble.

Th e solution is to install a very stiff material (usually a cementitious board) over the subfl oor and install the tile on that. I hope you enjoy your vestibule project: it is full of fun possibilities!

Judith Capen can be reached at Ju-

dith.capen@architravepc.com with

questions and comments. Praise is

always welcome. ★

capitalcommunitynews.com ★ 135

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