Overview

We, the House begins in 1878 in the frontier town of Newton on the Kansas prairie. There a battered Civil War Union veteran builds his new wife her dream house, an Italianate glory she names Ambleside who tells this story. Soon an early American portrait of Mrs. Simon Peale arrives from Hartford, Connecticut to dignify the dining room wall. She can hear and see what goes on inside the house. He can see what occurs outside. Each is isolated and alone until the portrait's existential yelp causes house and painting to discover each other, Ambleside is a perfect 'tabula rasa, ' almost literally born yesterday, and Mrs. Peale is a devastated young widow, a starchy professor of Latin, who has been dead since 1841. She is eager to teach and Ambleside is an avid learner. Together over 130 years, through the lives and generations of 'their' family, the two works of art witness and try to comprehend the panorama of American social history-from women's suffrage, three wars, the ice box, photography, and the invention of the two-by-four, to indoor plumbing and electrification, the Dust Bowl, the Depression, and Dachau, foxglove, the Love That Dare Not Speak its Name, the song of the catbird, and Little Women. Over the decades, a most unusual love develops between them and quietly deepens, until one day in 2010 an art historian from New York happens to see the portrait of Mrs. Peale and, abruptly, everything changes.

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9781736911259

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Reviews

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

Author Information

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. Susan Kander is a composer whose music has been heard across the United States and in Europe, China, Australia and South Africa. She received her BA in Music at Harvard, then side-stepped into fifteen years as a playwright before coming home to composition in the 1990s. Her music publisher is Subito Music Corp. She is a Fellow of the MacDowell Colony. Warren and Susan live in a brownstone in New York City where, starting many years ago, they raised two fine boys.

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